Dates of residency: Term 3：7/8~8/2  2024

Lei Siyu (b. 2002, Beijing) earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting and sculpture. She is currently based in New York.
Her selected exhibitions include Glass Motif (Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio, Hokkaido, Japan, 2025), Logging the Enchanted Forest (Gelman Gallery, Providence, RI, 2025), Painting Senior Show (Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI, 2025), and Oh, How I Feel It All (Memorial Hall Gallery, Providence, RI, 2025).
In addition to her stay with us, she has actively participated in residency programs such as Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio (Hokkaido, Japan) and Nomadic Red Corner (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia).
 
Lei Siyu’s practice moves across painting, sculpture, and writing, driven by an interest in crossing boundaries between disciplines, cultures, and identities. Having lived in multiple places, she is drawn to the in-between state of not fully belonging. Recently, she has focused on adaptation and mimicry, using trompe-l’œil strategies to test the edges of mediums. In her work, the eye may be fooled while the mind remains aware—an active tension that becomes part of the viewing experience.
She treats the surface as a ground where forms accumulate slowly through layers of “covering,” not to conceal but to integrate an essence. This approach extends beyond medium into shifts across geography, culture, and time, allowing her to consider how identity is constructed through memory and context. Her works often carry traces of self as performance—roles that continually change—while searching for what might remain constant beneath them.
 
During her residency, Lei Siyu was deeply inspired by the quietness and the beauty of the natural landscape surrounding Lake Saiko. The thoughts that began there continued to unfold long after her stay, leading to further works developed from that same thread.

Her senior thesis piece, for heavy the mountains, heavy the seas (oil on wooden sculpture), was shaped directly by her experiences at Lake Saiko.