Image: Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
Ben Brown Fine Arts will present ‘Echoes of Day and Night’, a solo exhibition of paintings by Qi Lei, in Hong Kong from 12 September to 24 October 2026. The exhibition marks the gallery’s first collaboration with the artist, who lives and works in Shanghai, and will be held at 201 The Factory, 1 Yip Fat Street, Wong Chuk Hang.
The exhibition centres on Qi Lei’s recent reflections on the relationship between music, painting and time. Its title emerged after the artist saw the post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor perform live last year. According to the gallery, the band’s music—largely abstract and seldom dependent on lyrics or text—develops its structure and rhythm through instrumental performance alone.
That musical language prompted Qi Lei to consider how figuration and abstraction relate to one another in painting. The gallery describes this question as an important point of departure for his painterly language, in which figurative and abstract approaches are treated not as separate categories but as a balance to be reconsidered in each work.
Qi Lei primarily paints in a figurative language, while questioning how an existing image can be transformed through the act of painting. Rather than reproducing an image, his stated concern is to dissolve the conventions of a ready-made picture and reorganise it through the rhythm of paint. The exhibition’s selection includes ‘Jungle Echoes’ (2026), ‘Morning Mist Rises at Dusk’ (2026), ‘Nighttime Twilight’ (2024), ‘The Lonely Musician Before the First Light of Dawn’ (2026) and ‘Babette Among the Wilds’ (2026).
Time and transition are particularly evident in ‘Morning Mist Rises at Dusk’. The work’s title brings together two apparently opposing points in the day, suggesting the difficulty of distinguishing dawn from dusk when changing light, rather than a clock, becomes the measure. The gallery connects this uncertainty to Qi Lei’s interest in moments that are difficult to place and in the movement from one temporal state to another.
The exhibition will open with a private view and artist talk on Saturday 12 September. Qi Lei will speak with critic and scholar Gladys Chung from 4pm to 5pm, followed by the private view from 5pm to 7pm. Ben Brown Fine Arts, which also lists gallery and office locations in London and a New York location by appointment, will show the exhibition at its Hong Kong venue through 24 October 2026.
