Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: while you marvel at the latest conceptual installations that turn galleries into airport waiting rooms, a Chinese painter living in Paris for twenty years patiently weaves a body of work that questions existence with an acuity that should make you blush at your certainties. Xie Lei has just won the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2025, and this crowning achievement is no accident: it rewards a pictorial practice that probes the depths of human ambiguity with intellectual rigor that few still dare to claim in the contemporary art scene.
Born in Huainan in 1983, trained at the Fine Arts Schools of Beijing and then Paris where he completed the first doctorate in plastic practice of the Parisian institution, Xie Lei belongs to that lineage of artists who have never given up the pictorial medium despite the sirens of conceptual art. His doctorate was entitled “Between Dusk and Dawn: Poetics of the Strange for a Painter of Today,” a phrase that admirably summarizes his artistic project. For it is precisely in this uncertain hour, this moment when day turns into night without one knowing exactly where the border lies, that the full power of his work resides.
For the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2025, Xie Lei presented seven monumental canvases of a phosphorescent green where spectral bodies seem to float in a cosmic amniotic fluid. Free fall or ascent? The painter refuses to decide, preferring to maintain his figures in this state of metaphysical weightlessness that characterizes his work. The silhouettes, deliberately blurry and devoid of identifiable features, radiate an almost supernatural light within a vegetal decor that evokes both the marine depths and nocturnal forests. This indeterminacy is not formal laziness but an asserted aesthetic project: by refusing to fix the identity, gender, or even the complete humanity of his figures, Xie Lei opens a space for universal projection.
French literature decisively nourished his imagination. Among his major references is Albert Camus, whose unfinished first novel “The Happy Death” (1971) [1] lent its title to a recent solo exhibition at Semiose in 2025. This Camusian oxymoron (how can one be both dead and happy?) resonates deeply with Xie Lei’s pictorial approach. In this novel written between 1936 and 1938 but abandoned by Camus himself, the character Patrice Mersault desperately seeks happiness, even if it means committing murder to seize the money that will allow him to live fully. This existential quest ends with a serene acceptance of death, in a fusion with Mediterranean nature that foreshadows the themes of The Stranger.
Xie Lei appropriates this tension between life and death, this suspended moment where Mersault, sick and lucid, accepts his fate with a form of tragic euphoria. His paintings cultivate exactly this zone of undecidability: are the bodies he represents dying or beings in mystical levitation? Are they sinking into the abyss or being reborn into a spiritual dimension? This structural ambiguity fits within the tradition of the philosophy of the absurd developed by Camus, where man must create his own meaning in a world devoid of intrinsic significance. Xie Lei’s figures seem to embody this precise moment when human consciousness confronts the meaninglessness of existence without sinking into nihilistic despair.
The oxymoron “happy death” finds its pictorial equivalent in the painter’s chromatic choices. These aquatic greens, deep blues, orangey yellows that bathe his characters correspond to no natural skin tone. Xie Lei composes his palettes without using black or white, layering about ten layers of blues and greens to achieve this unreal, almost psychedelic tone. The result produces an effect of spectral presence: the bodies seem both terribly carnal and completely ethereal, as if matter were dissolving into light. This chromatic duality materializes Camus’ intuition that the most intense happiness can arise at the very moment when one accepts the finitude of existence.
When Xie Lei titles his paintings with a single word, “Embrace”, “Breath”, “Possession” or “Rescue”, he proceeds like Camus naming his novel: through maximal condensation of meaning that leaves all interpretations open. A kiss can be a loving embrace or a vampiric suffocation. A breath can signify the life that persists or the last breath that escapes. This lexical economy forces the viewer to confront their own projection onto the work, to recognize that meaning is never given but always constructed by the one who looks. In “La Mort heureuse”, Mersault achieves happiness not by finding answers but by accepting the contradictions inherent in human existence. Xie Lei’s paintings offer a similar experience: they resolve nothing but provide a space of contemplation where paradoxes can coexist.
The artist disclosed in an interview: “My subjects are chimeras, combinations of elements drawn from my memory. Ordinary scenes where something extraordinary always happens” [2]. This statement reveals a closeness to Camus’ universe where the everyday suddenly shifts into the absurd, where an office worker can become a murderer under a blinding Algerian sun. Xie Lei’s “chimeras” are those moments when reality cracks and reveals another dimension of existence, neither quite alive nor quite dead, neither quite present nor quite absent. It is in this in-between that the “happy death” is lodged: not a definitive state but a passage, a transitional zone where opposites touch.
The relationship that Xie Lei has with psychoanalysis, and particularly with the works of Julia Kristeva, sheds light on another essential dimension of his work. Among the theoretical references he explicitly cites is this French writer of Bulgarian origin, whose research on abjection, strangeness, and borderline states of identity find striking echoes in his painting. Kristeva developed in “Strangers to Ourselves” (1988) [3] a profound reflection on the figure of the stranger, not as the other that one rejects, but as that part of ourselves that we repress. She writes that “the stranger dwells within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that ruins our home.” This idea that the most radical otherness is found within ourselves powerfully informs Xie Lei’s work.
His faceless figures, without identifiable gender, without clear ethnic belonging, precisely embody this constitutive strangeness of all identity. By refusing to give his characters features that would assign them to a social, racial, or sexual category, Xie Lei keeps them in a state of “identity fugitivity.” These floating bodies, with blurred contours, seem in perpetual metamorphosis, as if identity were never fixed but always in the making. Kristeva insisted that recognizing the stranger within oneself allows one not to hate him in the other. Xie Lei’s paintings operate according to this same principle: by representing beings who escape any stable categorization, they confront us with our own fundamental indeterminacy.
Kristeva’s concept of abjection also resonates in Xie Lei’s work, notably in his treatment of the dissolution of bodies. Abjection, according to Kristeva in “Powers of Horror” (1980) [4], designates what disturbs identity, the system, the order, what does not respect limits, places, rules. Now the figures painted by Xie Lei are precisely abject in this sense: they disrupt the boundaries between the living and the dead, between the material and the immaterial, between the self and the other. Their flesh seems to dissolve into the pictorial environment, their contours blend into the halos of light surrounding them, creating a deliberate confusion between subject and background. This ontological instability produces a fruitful unease in the spectator, who cannot stabilize his gaze on forms that constantly evade.
Xie Lei’s pictorial process, successive layers of oil paint followed by scraping with brushes, paper, or even by hand, participates in this aesthetics of dissolution. One can sometimes guess his fingerprints in the pictorial matter, traces of a physical presence that itself seems to be fading away. This technique creates surfaces of great tactile complexity where the light seems to emanate from inside the canvas rather than reflect on its surface. The bodies become autonomous luminous sources, phosphorescent, as if inhabited by a vital energy that persists even as their form disintegrates. It is perhaps here that Kristeva’s thought on melancholy resonates with the painter’s work.
In “Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia” (1987), Kristeva explores the psychic states where the subject experiences a loss that cannot be symbolized by language. Melancholia is characterized by an inability to mourn, by a paradoxical attachment to the lost object which becomes an inseparable part of the self. The ghostly figures of Xie Lei could be understood as pictorial incarnations of this melancholic state: neither fully present nor entirely absent, they haunt the pictorial space like revenants unable to leave the world of the living. Their ghostly luminescence evokes this persistence of what has disappeared, this insistent presence of absence that defines the melancholic experience. The aquatic green dominating his recent series could moreover be read as a liquid metaphor of this fluid psychic state, without clear contours, where the subject gets lost in a deathly reverie.
Kristeva also developed a reflection on the maternal dimension of the psyche, on this primordial bond to the mother that precedes any identity construction. The green and aquatic spaces that Xie Lei paints, with their enveloping and immersive qualities, inevitably evoke the amniotic fluid, this original environment where the fetus had not yet differentiated between itself and the external world. The bodies in free fall or levitating that populate his canvases seem to return to this prenatal fusion state, seeking to regain lost completeness. This regression to the original undifferentiation would thus be a desperate attempt to escape the pains of individuation, the wounds inevitably caused by separation from the mother.
Xie Lei’s practice is explicitly nourished by his nocturnal dreams, which the painter has often affirmed in interviews. For his Marcel Duchamp Prize project, he started from a recurring dream: the dream of flying that turns into a nightmare of falling. Kristeva, trained in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, gave paramount importance to the work of the dream in artistic production. The dream allows access to areas of the psyche inaccessible to daytime consciousness, to give shape to anxieties and desires that cannot be expressed otherwise. Xie Lei’s paintings function as visual dreams: they obey a dream logic where the laws of physics and identity are suspended, where bodies can float weightlessly, where colors no longer need to correspond to reality. This oneiric dimension partly explains the hypnotic effect of his canvases: they plunge us into a second state, between waking and sleeping, comparable to the one that Xie Lei himself seeks to reach to create.
The artist described his working method in two steps: first mental and conceptual, then physical and gestural. This duality recalls Kristeva’s distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic, between the order of structured language and that of bodily drives that overflow it. If the first phase corresponds to the symbolic, selection of an image, search for its multiple meanings, study of its cultural resonances, the second belongs to the semiotic: the artist gives room to chance, to “happy accidents”, to a gestural spontaneity that escapes rational control. This dialectic between mastery and letting go produces works where intellect and body constantly dialogue, where philosophical thought is embodied in the pictorial matter without ever being reduced to a mere illustration of ideas.
The question that Xie Lei raises in his practice could be formulated as follows: how to represent ambiguity in painting? How to give visible form to what by definition refuses any fixation, any stable determination? Kristeva had identified a “revolting” dimension in true art, that is, its capacity to challenge established orders, to disrupt reassuring classifications, to reveal the complexity hidden beneath apparent simplicity. Xie Lei’s paintings are revolting in this precise sense: they resist any univocal reading, frustrate the spectator’s desire for a transparent meaning, impose the disorienting experience of a beauty that cannot be possessed. They force us to accept that there are irreducible zones of indeterminacy, that not all paradoxes can be resolved, that some questions must remain open.
This acceptance of ambiguity is not easy relativism but an ethical and aesthetic demand. In a contemporary world obsessed with clarity, efficiency, and immediacy, where every phenomenon must be explainable in a few seconds on social networks, Xie Lei defends an assumed complexity. His canvases require time, patience, a contemplative availability that has become rare. They do not reveal themselves at first glance but unfold slowly, gradually revealing their layers of meanings. This slowness constitutes in itself a political gesture: against the generalized acceleration of our existences, against the tyranny of the infinite “scroll”, the painter imposes a meditative rhythm that allows the spectator to reconnect with his own interiority.
The director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Fabrice Hergott, praised in Xie Lei’s work “a particularly accomplished expression of what this beginning of the 21st century is,” where “the absence of landmarks and vertigo have become the sensations most commonly felt.” This sociological reading should not make us forget that the power of these paintings lies precisely in their refusal of the contemporary anecdotal. Xie Lei does not paint our era as a journalist would describe it; he grasps its deep affective structure, this existential anguish that transcends particular historical circumstances. His spectral figures speak as much of our present as of the human condition in general, of that metaphysical solitude that each generation must face in its own way.
Here is a painter who has neither given up on figuration nor on the philosophical ambition of art, who refuses the simplicities of the first degree as well as those of total abstraction, who patiently constructs a demanding work in a context unfavourable to such demand. His crowning with the Marcel Duchamp Prize should not be read as a mere institutional recognition but as the symptom of a collective need: that of rediscovering, confronted with the canvases of Xie Lei, a depth of questioning that the contemporary art market has too often dismissed in favour of the spectacular and the scandalous. These bodies suspended between fall and flight, between presence and absence, between life and death, remind us that art worthy of the name solves nothing but deepens our questions, does not console us but makes us more lucid faced with the enigma of our own existence. In a world saturated with instant images and prefab emotions, Xie Lei offers us something that has become precious: the necessary silence to hear the anxious murmur of our own abysses. Perhaps this, ultimately, is what one might call a happy death: accepting to look squarely at what frightens us, and discovering in this confrontation not terror but a strange form of serenity. The painter does not promise us happiness but shows us how to poetically inhabit our contradictions, how to transform our vertigo into pictorial matter, how to make our constitutive uncertainty not a weakness but the very source of a troubling and necessary beauty.
- Albert Camus, “The Happy Death”, Gallimard, collection Cahiers Albert Camus, 1971
- Quote from Xie Lei published in the catalogue of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2025 exhibition, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
- Julia Kristeva, “Strangers to Ourselves”, Fayard, 1988
- Julia Kristeva, “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”, Éditions du Seuil, 1980
