Echoes of Day and Night is a solo presentation by Chinese artist Qi Lei at Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hongkong. The exhibition centres on the artist’s recent reflections on music, painting and time with the title emerging from the Qi Lei seeing the post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor perform live last year.

Their music is highly abstract, seldom relying on lyrics or text, and builds its structure and rhythm through instrumental performance alone. That abstract musical language led him to consider how figuration and abstraction stand in relation to one another in painting, and it has become an important point of departure for his own painterly language.

For Qi Lei, Echoes of Day and Night points, on the one hand, to the relationship between figuration and abstraction in painting, and on the other, to the passage and transformation of time. Morning Mist Rises at Dusk (2026) carries the temporal idea in its title. ‘Morning mist’ and ‘dusk’ seem to belong to opposite ends of the day, yet with no clock to consult and only the eye to judge the changing light, dusk and dawn can be remarkably hard to tell apart, as can sunset and the moments before sunrise. These are the hard-to-place moments that interest Qi Lei, along with the transition from one state of time to the next.

The same concern runs through Qi Lei’s thinking about figurative and abstract languages in painting, which he sees not as separate things but as a balance to be sought again with every work. He paints primarily in a figurative language, and one question it keeps putting to him is how to handle an image that already exists – how to dissolve the conventions of a ready-made picture and draw it back into the rhythm of painting itself. The aim is not to reproduce an image but to reorganise it.

Qi Lei “Echoes of Day and Night” // Ben Brown Fine Arts // Honkong, China // Through 24 October 2026 // https://www.benbrownfinearts.com

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