Ongoing Projects

• Pink Fantasy
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• Previous Projects
• Give Me 1 Minute
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• Commissioned Work

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• Books
• Press
• Exhibitions

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JOY ISLAND LEI 欢岛
Photographer and Visual Artist

Joy Island Lei (欢岛) is a photographer and visual artist based in New York and Beijing. Her work explores individual experiences, identity, and collective memory in contemporary society, focusing on Chinese youth and East Asian women in cross-cultural contexts. She holds a Master of Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) and has over 15 years of experience in visual creation.

Since 2009, she has worked on the personal project Give Me One Minute , documenting over 100 fashionable young Chinese in major cities, exploring loneliness and ephemeral expression. In 2015, her work appeared on the homepage of Vogue Italia PhotoVogue, and she has been featured by Vogue Me, Chinese Photography, Marie Claire NOW, WWD, and Guyu Imaging. She worked for clients like Nike, Canon, Benefit, and Huawei, and magazines like Cosmopolitan



China, L’Officiel China, and Timeout Beijing are doing commercial, fashion, and portrait photography.

From 2020 to 2024, she was shortlisted for the Three Shadows Photography Award, Padova Photography Festival, Paris ASVOFF, and Lishui Photography Festival, won the Silver Award at Beijing Fashion Week, and received a nomination for the Young Promotion Plan at the Pingyao International Photography Festival.


In 2025, she launched a new photography project in New York focusing on gendered situations and migration stories of Asian women, with the works included in her new book Pink Fantasy, which was exhibited at the SVA  Gramercy Gallery in Manhattan in September of the same year.

All images on this site copyright©JOY ISlAND,2025

New York 2025