When the Franco-Chinese painter Xie Lei was named the winner of the 2025 Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious contemporary art award, it felt less like the coronation of a rising star than the recognition of a quietly transformative force in contemporary painting. His canvases, thick with atmosphere and ambiguity, breathe the strange air between waking and dreaming — where figures dissolve, memories curdle, and the visible world feels like a mirage about to vanish.
When the Franco-Chinese painter Xie Lei was named the winner of the 2025 Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious contemporary art award, it felt less like the coronation of a rising star than the recognition of a quietly transformative force in contemporary painting. His canvases, thick with atmosphere and ambiguity, breathe the strange air between waking and dreaming — where figures dissolve, memories curdle, and the visible world feels like a mirage about to vanish.
The €35,000 prize, accompanied by a residency at Sèvres – Manufacture et Musée Nationaux, situates Xie Lei within the lineage of artists who have reshaped the boundaries of French art while expanding its global resonance. For an artist who has spent years navigating the space between cultures, philosophies, and histories, this acknowledgment feels especially apt: Xie’s art lives precisely in those in-between spaces — between East and West, figuration and abstraction, nightmare and revelation.
The Artist Between Worlds
Born in 1983 in Huainan, China, Xie Lei’s path to recognition has been marked by a steady, introspective evolution rather than sudden acclaim. After earning his bachelor’s degree at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, he moved to Paris, where he completed both a master’s and a Ph.D. at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, followed by research at London’s Royal College of Art. This academic rigor finds its echo in his painting practice: each work feels like an essay on the porousness of perception, the way memory reshapes reality into something half-remembered and half-invented.
He cites Delacroix, Goya, and Velázquez as his artistic ancestors — painters who navigated the psychological depths of the human condition — yet his influences extend into the realm of philosophy and literature. Julia Kristeva, Zhuang Zhou, and Pu Songling infuse his work with a sense of linguistic and cultural layering, where meaning flickers like a candlelight between traditions.
Chimeras of Memory and Light
Xie Lei refuses the use of live models. His figures, as he explains, “are chimeras, combinations of elements drawn from my memory — banal scenes where something extraordinary always happens.”
The result is a world populated by spectral presences: faceless silhouettes, human forms half-dissolved into mist or shadow, eyes like portals to another dimension.
His latest series — seven monumental canvases shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris as part of the Prix Marcel Duchamp exhibition — bathes these figures in a phosphorescent green light that seems to emanate from within the skin of the painting itself. It’s an eerie radiance, part bioluminescence, part toxic dream. The color becomes a psychological agent — a luminous decay that suggests both rebirth and haunting.
Here, light functions not as illumination but as revelation: it exposes what is repressed, what hovers beneath the surface of consciousness. Each brushstroke carries the tension of concealment and disclosure, as though Xie is painting the fragile membrane between thought and form.
The Language of Silence
What makes Xie Lei’s paintings so compelling is their quietness. In an art world often dominated by noise — digital saturation, political spectacle, conceptual overexposure — his works speak in whispers. They do not assert meaning; they unfold it, like smoke from a candle that has just been extinguished.
This sensibility might recall the poetic restraint of Zhuang Zhou’s “Butterfly Dream”, where identity becomes fluid and the self dissolves into the surrounding world. In Xie’s universe, figures appear to be caught in similar transformations — between human and animal, shadow and substance, body and spirit.
These are paintings that ask for patience. They reward looking not with recognition, but with reverie. Each work is less an image than a state of being — a suspended thought rendered visible.
Dreams as Geography
Xie Lei’s achievement in winning the Prix Marcel Duchamp is not only a personal triumph but also a subtle shift in the contemporary art landscape. His art bridges continents without flattening their distinctions, merging the psychological intensity of European Romanticism with the meditative slowness of Chinese aesthetics.
In a time when painting is often seen as a vehicle for identity politics or conceptual irony, Xie reclaims it as a tool for metaphysical exploration. His work suggests that dreams, memories, and sensations are not merely private — they are collective terrains we all traverse, unknowingly connected by our own inner shadows.
The exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, curated by Julia Garimorth and Jean-Pierre Criqui, showcases not just Xie’s new works but also those of his fellow finalists Bianca Bondi, Eva Nielsen, and Lionel Sabatté. Yet it is Xie’s canvases that linger in the mind long after one leaves the museum — like afterimages from a dream you cannot quite recall but cannot forget.
The Alchemy of the Unseen
To watch Xie Lei’s ascent is to witness an artist who paints not the visible, but the invisible currents that shape our perception. His art exists in the liminal zone where consciousness gives way to intuition, where color and form become vessels for the ineffable.
Editor’s Choice
The Prix Marcel Duchamp, named after the father of conceptual subversion, often rewards irony or provocation. In choosing Xie Lei, the jury instead recognized a subtler revolution — one of inwardness, silence, and imagination. His work reminds us that in the age of spectacle, the most radical act may still be to dream.