Discover Qi Lei, the Chinese Artist Inspired by Post-Rock and Gauguin

Description

The music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor is renowned for provoking strong reactions in listeners. For Qi Lei, seeing the Canadian band live was such a profound revelation, it energised the creation of his new solo exhibition Echoes of Day and Night. Interestingly, the Shanghai-based artist has been listening to the abstract, rhythmic sound collages of post-rock — finding physical parallels in the instrumental genre’s rhythmic strokes and colourful tone-painting — since 2020, to which the exhibition’s earliest pieces date. A painting titled “Blue Sonata,” from that very year, wears this sonic influence proudly.  

The passage of that six-year period may not be incidental. For Qi’s paintings are a meditation on time: without a clock in view, his landscapes can often be easily understood by the transitional moments they depict, whether by morning mist or the golden glow of dusk. Again, the message is clear in titles like “Morning Mist Rises at Dusk” (pictured above)  and “Lonely Musician Before First Light” (both 2026). These canvases proudly portray the marks of his visual influences: masters Henri Rousseau, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian scenes.

The artist’s other preoccupation is the porous divide between figurative and abstract artistic languages — which these canvases typically depict easily definable forms, Qi works to dissolve the conventions of perspective, once more inspired by the rhythms of music. Another source of rhyme is Ennio Morricone, the great sound painter of scores wide and wild enough to soundtrack vividly technicolour Westerns movies.