When the Gig Follows You Into the Gallery: Qi Lei’s Echoes of Day and Night

Installation view, Qi Lei: Echoes of Day and Night, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong, 2026. Image from the gallery’s exhibition page.

Some concerts follow you home. The lights come up, everybody starts looking for their belongings, and your brain is still somewhere inside the performance. We love discovering what artists do with that feeling.

For Shanghai-based painter Qi Lei, an encounter with Godspeed You! Black Emperor helped shape the thinking behind Echoes of Day and Night, on view at Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong through October 24. The exhibition opened September 12 and marks his first collaboration with the gallery.

According to the gallery’s account, seeing the band last year prompted thoughts about how music creates an experience without depicting a literal scene. That question crosses into his painting: how can an image do more than reproduce what is in front of us?

The installation photographs give us plenty to investigate. Color gathers into dense, leafy passages; recognizable forms share space with marks that are harder to pin down. You can look for a landscape, or let the painting pull your attention somewhere less easily named.

One 2026 work is titled Morning mist rises at dusk. Even before seeing it, that meeting of two times of day suggests a small invitation to loosen our usual expectations.

This is exactly the kind of exchange between music and visual art that makes us curious. It is not a claim that a painting sounds like a band. It is a reminder that listening can change how somebody looks—and what they make afterward.

If Hong Kong is not on your calendar, the gallery’s online installation views and selected works offer a worthwhile introduction. Explore the exhibition here. Consider it a little room for your eyes after a good long workout for your ears.

Written by Chetuno