Huang Kui’s new work starts with photographs he newly took in 2019 of an abandoned town in the outskirts of Beibei, Chongqing. The town emerged around coal mining, expanded during the Anti-Japanese War, and sustained production for decades afterward. Some ten years ago, excessive excavation caused land subsidence, rendering the area unsafe for habitation; residents were relocated and the site left vacant. This local history is not directly depicted but serves as an underlying narrative layer.

The painting begins with a realist landscape but gradually deviates from objective representation as it develops. The shifting visual forms point toward an interplay of multiple temporalities—rapid, slow, and nearly static—woven together as the artist deliberately steps outside linear, empirical time, breaking the conventional logic of space and chronology.

Lightning was introduced at a later stage as a central visual motif. An earlier plan to include flames of war, evoking the town’s wartime past, was abandoned because the artist, having never personally experienced combat, refrained from a superficial historical pastiche. The lightning was chosen instead for its cool, neutral quality, closer to a pure temporal marker: it registers, distinguishes, and overlays different rates of time within the same picture plane, functioning as the conceptual anchor that binds the work’s structure.