I am Bei Qi, a second year MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. In my work, a children’s parachute becomes an ocean, tethered with portable homes of my mom and grandmother’s clothing, and my dad, my grandparents, and my grandparents' friends hum their favorite childhood song within each petal of a giant fabric flower. I seek to reactivate childhood whimsy in adult bodies, repurposing my own archive of childhood clothing, objects, and putting a twist on childhood games or forms. I want people to feel like we don’t need to act or feel “right”, but rather have the right to feel. I believe that playing as children is second nature, but playing as adults is a form of radical resistance.

The base of my practice is wearable sculptures, paintings, and collages, often ones that connect multiple people. Some pieces are heavy, forcing the body to slow. Others remove the arms, the part of us that usually leads, so movement has to be found some other way. In my work, concealment is not disappearance, but appearance: another version of ourselves, finally given a body. What happens when we look like creatures no one has ever seen, and another version of ourselves emerges? What happens when our movement becomes restricted, and the stumbling that results isn't a limitation but a new choreography? What happens when the rules of how we must look or act are removed, and what's left isn't emptiness but freedom? 

I am interested in becoming free through becoming plural. Whether through wearable collage, film, live performance, sound, or a hybrid, I use layering as a form of agency. Voices become layered to create their own symphonies, visuals overlap and never truly align. When we can’t be pinned down, no one can decide who we are or might become.