Rei Xiao’s Chimeric Oil Paintings in Brooklyn

Figures in Rei Xiao's paintings don't stand. They crawl across snowy ground with a city skyline behind them, press their faces against bodies larger than their own, hang suspended in webs with something dangling beneath.

The postures are specific: between animal and human, between arriving and leaving, between the city that made you and the one that hasn't decided yet..

The non-human is not decorative in this work. Sphynxes, spiders, and foster cats merge with human figures in ways that feel less like allegory and more like taxonomy, a visual record of what it means to be categorized as other.

Growing up as a Chinese-Turkish minority in Istanbul, Xiao shared a household with her single mother and twenty foster cats.

That cross-species proximity now operates in the paintings as both subject and formal premise: the animals are centered because they were present, because they mattered, and because they held a kind of belonging the city extended freely to strays but not always to her.

The dehumanized body does not reach for the human again. It reaches for the animal, which was always closer.

Snowflakes dissolving in their own sticky blood (2024) holds the fullest geography of the practice. A figure in a tracksuit moves on all fours across a field of white, the Istanbul skyline silhouetted behind her at dusk. Around her, objects have landed as if dropped mid-flight: a miniature ferry, an armchair, a stool, blood drops in the snow.

The figure looks directly at the viewer, her head too large for her body, her posture borrowed from the cats. The city exists as background and origin, unreachable, still present as outline.

The domestic objects in Xiao's work carry a specific address. You've been Turked (2025) centers on an ornate Ottoman display cabinet, the kind kept in living rooms and filled with tea sets and family photographs. A chimeric cat-human is stretched across the carved top, claws gripping the wood.

Inside the glass panels, a dark face is visible alongside glassware and lace. The title comes from a meme: a cat in a fez beside a glass of black tea, captioned "You've been turked!", part dare, part joke, something between a tag and a claim.

What the painting takes from it is the verb: to be turked, to have an identity handed to you without being asked, the way a duty arrives, and the only thing left to do with it is carry it across the room.

Hybridity in the paintings never resolves into comfort. The Sphynx-like figure in Biscuits, biscuits presses against a larger body with a force that reads neither as aggression nor tenderness, but as something prior to both.

Xiao earned her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University on full scholarship. While at Tufts, she spent a semester at Central Saint Martins at the University of Arts, London.

She has recently participated in Fountainhead Residency in Miami and The Macedonia Institute in Chatham, NY, and was shortlisted for the Bennett Prize in 2025.

Her first New York solo exhibition, "The Flea and the Acrobat," was presented at Fragment Gallery in early 2025.

The biographical context matters, but the paintings hold more than it can contain. What Xiao makes visible, in the postures, in the furniture, in the cross-species arrangements, is the specific spatial logic of belonging somewhere that does not return the claim.

That the cats were real makes it neither more nor less true.

Rei Xiao on Instagram