Once More Encore: The First Year of Benny's Video Remixed

The first thing you might hear: the heart-cracking chords of Sinéad O'Connor's “Nothing Compares 2 U,” slowed until only its emotional architecture remains. Wistful, like a memory surfacing from somewhere deep, somewhere locked away.

That’s the tempo for everything here. Craig Jun Li, an artist and curator of the nomadic project Benny’s Video, has hung the show so it feels like opening a lovingly kept sketchbook where one idea drifts into the next.

Color does much of the work of stitching the show together. Dusty blues, weathered creams, smoky greys, warm earth tones. A sudden flash of luminous green makes every work around it hum a little louder.

The lines share a rhythm, too. Delicate and calligraphic, whether traced in pencil, carved into paint, or roots memorialized in poured resin. Like notes on a sheet of music, images echo, ricochet, and answer one another with uncanny synchronicity.

The experience recalls a traditional Chinese handscroll slowly unfurling. Each work nudges your eye to the next. Like a quiet game of whispers. Before long, you’re inside it.

Craig Jun Li (b. Zhengzhou, China, 1998) is an artist, curator, and arts worker based in New York. Li has exhibited internationally and works closely with artists' estates. In 2025, he founded Benny's Video, a nomadic curatorial project he affectionately describes as "for freaks and lovers." Over the course of a year, he presented nine intimate exhibitions in his tiny artist sublet in Bushwick.