Rei Xiao (b. 2000) is a Chinese-Turkish visual artist, born and raised in Istanbul, Türkiye, and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and pursued further studies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in the UK. Her work has been exhibited at Mamut Art Project (Istanbul); CerModern (Ankara); Subtitle Labs (London); the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); the Muskegon Museum of Art (Muskegon, MI); the Arnot Art Museum (Elmira, NY); Fragment Gallery (New York); and September Gallery (Kinderhook, NY). She has been an artist-in-residence at ChaNorth, Vermont Studio Center and The Macedonia Institute. Her first solo exhibition, The Flea and the Acrobat, was held at Fragment Gallery in 2025. Xiao has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and was a finalist for The Bennett Prize. In 2026 she will take part in the Fountainhead Artist Residency in Miami, supported by the Leomi Foundation.

Rei Xiao’s work is strongly autobiographical, weaving dreamlike landscapes together with personal experience through painting. Her compositions incorporate cryptic details and messages that, through allegory, suggest narratives extending beyond the edges of the canvas. Moving between the playful and the macabre, she explores the tension between dwelling in trauma and the urge to expand the vocabulary of her own consciousness.

Her Chinese-Turkish background informs her interest in hybridity and in-between spaces, projecting her inner world onto objects and animals that function as symbolic vessels. Through these images, Xiao constructs narratives that begin in lived reality but shift into alternative dimensions, where the intimate is transformed into myth.