Qi Lei
Echoes of Day and Night

Ben Brown Fine Arts

Hong Kong

Sep 12–Oct 31, 2026

How is the tempo of time marked? What pace do the hours keep to, when not measured by a clock? These questions have long fascinated Shanghai-based artist Qi Lei, and they receive sustained inquiry in his solo show “Echoes of Day and Night” at Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong. Inspired by traditional Western landscape conventions and the post-rock instrumentals of bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Qi examines how pictorial rhythm is orchestrated through oil, and how the painter—as composer—conducts the illusion of duration.

In Blue Sonata (2020), a canoe drifts through a jungle clearing across a hazy expanse of water. Qi’s framing evokes the compositional vignette of classic seascapes like Caspar David Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (c. 1818), but strips the scene of its human presence down to a solitary, empty vessel. A palette of cool blues and greens calls to mind Frank Sinatra’s 1955 album In the Wee Small Hours, itself an exploration of the lonesome cadence of a nascent morning. Elements of abstraction materialize in the surrounds: vegetation blends into unknown shapes, intricate and insectile, contrasting with the spare brushstroke defining the distant hull. An illusory musicality permeates the tableau, moving steadily through the calm waters. Qi’s inquiry characterizes first light as an unhurried, elusive dream.

Hunting (2021) develops these leitmotifs under opposite chromatic tones. A leopard sits atop its kill within a dense jungle, bathed in the rosy fingers of dusk. While the narrative recalls Henri Rousseau’s Le lion, ayant faim, se jette sur l’antilope (1898–1905), Qi resists Rousseau’s theatrical staging. Rather than occupying pride of place, the beasts merge into the surrounding thicket. Sponged smears of oil blur foliage and foreground into chimerical distortions—a subtractive handling designed to deconstruct figurative clarity. Channeling his fascination with musical structures, Qi charges the canvas with an abrupt stillness, like the pregnant pause that follows a high-intensity crescendo—as if the chase has only just ended.

The lone canoe recurs in Morning mist rises at dusk (2026), joined here by a figure whose torso blends into the surrounding branches, their face left blank. Like the leopard in Hunting, this human form serves the wider composition rather than commanding it; shape and color act as instruments within an ensemble. Temporal anonymity reaches its zenith: an indigo sky is fractured by a pink haze, the exact hour lost somewhere between daybreak and twilight. Even the figure’s gesture is unresolved: are they launching the craft or dragging it ashore? Caught between thresholds, a transitory tension holds rhythm at a standstill; what remains is insoluble suspense.

Walking through Qi’s show can feel like wading through a dream: colors are unnaturally vibrant, recognizable forms buckle, and the pulse of time is at once fluid and rigid. Brushwork operates as a metronome, spatial massing provides the percussive beats, and the hues of sunrise and sunset answer to one another. After all, what is dusk, if not an echo of the dawn?

Harison Butler is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.