On clear evenings, just after sundown, a brief period of diffused, deep-blue light permeates the landscape as the amber glow of sunset fades and street lights flicker to life. This liminal moment forms the backdrop of Lewis Lee’s Blue Hour (2024), set in a rural border town just north of Hong Kong. The painting first appears to be a romanticized vision of country life seen through a window, but a subtle shift in perspective reveals the tableau to be a mere reflection, caught in the panes of a darkened, uninhabited dwelling. In this twilight community, sunset no longer promises a new dawn.

Lee is a Hong Kong-born artist, now based in Thailand, whose practice spans painting, installation, and photography. Approaching landscape as a vessel for memory, migration, and identity, his recent work reimagines the Hong Kong borderlands as sites where personal narrative intersects with colonial legacy and urban growth, blending lived history with semi-imagined scenes that shimmer between the then and now.