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Galleria Continua presents Dawn’s Bells and Dusk’s Drums, a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Ni Youyu, on view from April 3 – June 30, 2026, at the gallery’s Beijing space. The showcase marks both the contemporary artist’s first collaboration with the gallery and his debut solo presentation in Beijing. Structured around the concept of time, the art exhibition brings together painting, sculpture, installation and collage works that investigate temporality through material transformation.
“Building on key projects previously presented in major museum contexts, the exhibition not only assembles key bodies of work, but also a number of recent creations, many of which are shown here for the first time, forming a milestone presentation within the artist’s career,” Galleria Continua notes.
The contemporary art show draws on Eastern and Western art histories, as well as Zen Buddhist philosophy. The title, Dawn’s Bells and Dusk’s Drums, references the cyclical rhythms of Zen monastic ritual, evoking the passage from dawn to dusk through the sounding of bells and drums. “In Ni’s work, time is not only accumulated through practice, but embedded within materials, images and methods as a central concern—through historical traces, the juxtaposition of elements from different periods, and the slow process of making, together forming an internal structure of time within his works,” the art gallery notes.
The ground floor presents a constellation of Ni’s key works spanning several major series. At the centre is The Painting Exhibition in the Woods V, a newly commissioned 7.2-metre-wide painting and the largest work to date from his ongoing Golden Water Washing series. Nearby, The Disappearing Waterfall II reduces landscape imagery to an elemental dialogue between stone and water. The exhibition also premieres the long-developing Dynamic Balance series, conceived over 14 years, alongside the suspended Sound of the Void installation in the central hall. Smaller rooms within the main exhibition space house intimate paintings featuring recurring motifs such as curtains and doors.
A corridor installation is devoted to Freewheeling Trip, an ongoing series initiated in 2011. Using found vintage photographs sourced from around the world, Ni cuts and reassembles fragments into fictional landscapes that challenge photography’s relationship to memory and representation.
The second floor expands into a more cosmological register with the presentation of Galaxy, which transforms coins into painterly units through repeated hammering and reworking. “Through this process, value undergoes a continuous transformation—from presence to absence, and back again—culminating in vast star-like constellations composed through Ni’s accumulated labour,” the gallery explains. Another installation in the Dynamic Balance series reimagines the solar system through found objects, including sports balls and mirrored disco balls, extending Ni’s ongoing interest in equilibrium and cosmic order.
The exhibition concludes on the third floor with the artist’s celebrated Arch series. Since 2011, Ni has transformed antique pinball machines into hybrid sculptural forms that merge architecture, painting and installation. “As a cross-cultural architectural archetype, the arch resonates with the gallery’s pitched roof while also evoking a broader relationship between the human body and the cosmos, acquiring a heightened, almost ritual dimension within the exhibition,” the gallery notes.
“Dawn’s Bells and Dusk’s Drums is not only a systematic reflection on Ni Youyu’s artistic trajectory over the past decade, but also a meditation on time, perception and the conditions of making…the exhibition also reveals an artist who, within an increasingly noisy and accelerated art world, continues to pursue a restrained yet unwavering path—one defined by persistence, clarity and a deeply personal rhythm of creation.” Galleria Continua concludes.
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