Qi Lei doesn’t title his paintings after what’s in them. He titles them after the hour of the day when it’s genuinely hard to tell whether the light is arriving or leaving: Morning Mist Rises at Dusk. The Lonely Musician Before First Light. It’s a small habit, but it says a lot about where his recent work is coming from, and it isn’t, strictly speaking, painting at all. It’s a live show.
Last year, Qi Lei saw the Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor perform live. Their music builds entirely through instrumental structure, rarely relying on lyrics, and the experience sent him back to his studio with a question he hadn’t previously put into words: what does it mean for a painting to have that kind of abstract, wordless rhythm, and how does a figurative painter, someone who still paints recognisable forests, figures, landscapes, borrow that structure without simply illustrating it? That question is now the spine of Echoes of Day and Night, his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong since 2014, opening this month at Ben Brown Fine Arts.
From Anhui to Tianjin: a decade of quietly building a language
Qi Lei was born in 1986 in Suixi, a county in Anhui province, and graduated from the Oil Painting Department at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2014. He now lives and works in Shanghai. Unlike artists whose biography reads as a single dramatic break, Qi Lei’s has been a steadier accumulation: a solo debut at Gome Art Foundation in Hong Kong the same year he graduated, followed by shows at ARTMIA Foundation in Beijing (2015) and, across several returns, at Matthew Liu Fine Arts in Shanghai, the gallery that has represented him for most of his career and where he held solo exhibitions in 2017, 2019 and 2023. His work has entered the collections of the Hong Kong Simian Foundation, the Shanghai ASE Foundation, Nanjing Deji Art Museum, Beijing ARTMIA Foundation and the Yungang Grottoes Institute, and has been shown at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art and the Shenzhen Guan Shanyue Art Museum, among other institutions.
What’s stayed consistent across that decade is a commitment to figurative painting handled at one remove from illustration. Qi Lei deliberately dissolves or obscures faces, hands and other identifying features in his work, not to depersonalise his subjects out of coldness but because, in his own account, he doesn’t want skin colour, race or identity to become the primary terms through which a painting gets discussed. The body, in his paintings, functions as a field of colour and form working alongside other elements in the composition, rather than as a site for explicit political or social commentary. It’s a position that puts him at some distance from the identity-driven currents that dominate a lot of contemporary figurative painting internationally, and it’s worth sitting with rather than rushing past.
Landscape as still life, dusk as a musical form
Qi Lei’s recent landscapes belong to a long tradition that Western viewers will recognise even if the specific reference points are unfamiliar. He has cited Henri Rousseau’s imagined jungles, Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian scenes, and, more recently, Peter Doig’s psychologically loaded landscapes, as well as Caspar David Friedrich’s recurring return to nocturnal seascapes and dusk, as touchstones for his own interest in the changing nature of time and light. One new painting, Babette of the Jungle (2026), takes its title from Gabriel Axel’s 1987 film Babette’s Feast and treats a jungle scene the way a still-life painter might treat a table of fruit and bread: vegetation grouped, layered and consciously arranged rather than simply observed, with the depth of the background deliberately simplified so the foreground foliage can carry the composition’s weight.
That still-life logic, applied to landscape, is where the post-rock listening habit becomes visible in the actual paintings rather than just the artist’s statement. Qi Lei has talked about the way Ennio Morricone’s more classically inflected scores and the instrumental abstraction of post-rock both pushed him to think harder about rhythm as a formal problem in painting, not metaphorically but literally: how one passage of colour is coordinated against another, how a composition builds and releases tension the way a piece of music does. A painting keeps time much as music does, is roughly how he’s put it, and the works in Echoes of Day and Night, several of them started after 2020, carry titles that reach directly toward that idea: Jungle Echoes, Blue Sonata, the sonata form borrowed outright from music, sitting alongside the more atmospheric, hour-of-day titles.
None of this, Qi Lei has been careful to note, is about using software or AI to pre-generate a composition before painting it. His interest runs the opposite direction, back toward the physical, unhurried process of arranging a canvas by hand, which puts him in an interesting, understated dialogue with an artist like Sun Xun, whose decade-long woodcut animation Magic Atlas makes a related argument about slowness as a deliberate response to accelerated, machine-generated image culture, albeit through a completely different medium and mythology. Readers who enjoyed our piece on Zhang Enli will also recognise something of Qi Lei’s patience here, even though the two painters are working toward very different ends.
Current Exhibition
Qi Lei: Echoes of Day and Night
Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong
12 September – 24 October 2026
This is Qi Lei’s first solo presentation in Hong Kong since his 2014 debut at Gome Art Foundation, and Ben Brown Fine Arts’ first collaboration with the artist. The show brings together thirteen paintings made between 2020 and 2026, tracing exactly the period in which the influence of music on his compositional thinking became most pronounced.
If you’re in Hong Kong through late October, this is a quiet, patiently built show rather than a spectacle, worth the unhurried look it’s asking for. Watch our social channels this week for a closer look at individual works.
Qi Lei: Frequently Asked Questions
Qi Lei (b. 1986, Suixi, Anhui) is a Chinese figurative painter who lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2014 and is represented by Matthew Liu Fine Arts, Shanghai.
Echoes of Day and Night is Qi Lei’s solo exhibition at Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong, bringing together thirteen paintings made between 2020 and 2026 that explore the relationship between figuration and abstraction, drawing on the artist’s interest in post-rock and film-score music.
The exhibition runs at Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong, from 12 September to 24 October 2026. It is Qi Lei’s first solo show in Hong Kong since 2014.
He has said he does not want skin colour, race or identity to become the primary terms through which his work is discussed. Figures function instead as fields of colour and form within the composition.
He cites Henri Rousseau, Paul Gauguin, Peter Doig and Caspar David Friedrich as visual touchstones, alongside Ennio Morricone’s film scores and the post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor as musical influences on his sense of compositional rhythm.
His solo exhibitions include shows at Gome Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2014), ARTMIA Foundation, Beijing (2015), and multiple exhibitions at Matthew Liu Fine Arts, Shanghai, most recently in 2023, along with group exhibitions at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art and Shenzhen Guan Shanyue Art Museum.