Chuanyi Lei was born in Beijing in 1987. In 2010, he graduated from the Department of Historical Architecture, Faculty of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, and completed his master's degree at Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University, Department of Traditional Turkish Arts in 2018. He started his doctoral programme in the same department. He is currently working as a lecturer at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Ankara Social Sciences University, while he is also an invited researcher at the Intercultural Communication Research Centre of Hebei University, China.

Lei, who started his artistic journey in 2000 by following in the footsteps of his father Ali Leigong, the founder of the Chinese Islamic Miniature School, took lessons from Lee Shi-lin and Prof. Sun Jusheng. The artist, who continues to work on Sumi-e technique and flower-animal paintings, worked as a project manager at Tsinghua University Cultural Heritage Conservation and Research Institute between 2010-2014. Between 2018 and 2024, he taught Chinese calligraphy and painting at the Confucius Institutes of Yeditepe University and Okan University in Istanbul.

Lei has been researching Chinese and Turkish Islamic Arts, publishing articles and organising exhibitions worldwide since 2009. He has had solo exhibitions in China and Türkiye on the theme of cats and has participated in many biennials in Asia and Europe.  He also plans to translate and publish the book ''Osmanlı Resim Sanatı'' (''Ottoman Painting Art''), one of the important works of Turkish painting, into Chinese.