Brush Ink Light Shadow 

‘The nude has never (except in erotic art) had a place in the Chinese traditional repertoire’. So, can Lei Lei’s nudes be called Chinese? Unquestionably. For here is a Chinese artist, using a Chinese medium to express his experience and feeling as a Chinese, and what could be more Chinese than that?  ‘In any case, the battle over the nude, which Liu Haisu fought in the early twenties, has long been won, and even Zhou Enlai in the nineteen-fifties defended drawing the nude as essential training for the figure painter. So it is not the subject of Lei Lei’s new painting that is revolutionary, but that - and this is the third thing that marks him out, he shows how the Chinese medium of brush and ink, which is traditionally a linear art, can, through skilful and extremely subtle gradations of light and shade, produce those tactile values’. - Professor Michael Sullivan (Art Historian)