Chak Man Lei

Chak Man Lei was born in Hong Kong in 1977 and moved to Macau when he was eight years old. In 1989, at the age of twelve, his family moved to Canada and settled in Vancouver. He continued his studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), with a brief one-year sojourn at the École Nationale Supérieure Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and at the University of Western Ontario, earning an MFA degree in 2008. Upon graduating, he moved to Beijing where he currently resides.

His recent work focuses on interpreting the different ways of looking at the idea of time. As he states it:

“The accumulation and deposition of time enable us to survey and develop more potential meaningfulness from something that has been done in the past—and time in this material sense is non-linear. We cannot physically go back in time, but artists can choose a point in time and alter the thing(s) as we see fit. If Einstein’s theory is right that all times exist in the now, then the act of art-making is the vehicle for time travelling; we can certain go pick from the past, and we can also imagine and realize what might have been in the future.”

Chak Man Lei was the senior administrator for the Beijing 798 Biennale (2009), and has worked as an editor for the Chinese contemporary art magazine Art Map.

A selection of exhibitions that Chak Man Lei has participated are:

Mingyuan Art Center (Shanghai 2010), Beijing Art Space (Beijing 2012), Where Where Art Space (Beijing 2013), 37.8 ARTLAB (Beijing 2014), Schema Art Museum (South Korea 2014), Alternative Culture Making (Shenzhen 2014), Headbones Gallery (Vernon 2014), WORKJAM (Beijing 2015), The Author Gallery (Beijing 2015), Jiali Gallery (Beijing 2016).