Bei Qi is a first year performance MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. In her practice, whimsy emerges through vibrantly colored, stylized figures and garments, where an adult hand creates in a childlike style. Wearable art serves as a catalyst for photoshoots, improvised movement, and live performance, ultimately transforming into large-scale paintings, installations, and multi-channel film environments.

Qi reactivates shared childhood objects, tents, parachutes, her old toys, clothes, and Halloween costumes, transforming them into tools for healing. She sees play as an intentional, radical act of resistance, using the performance of wearables to transform grief and trauma into cycles of renewal. Her work explores how concealing the body through these wearables allows the wearer to become an emotional vessel, entering a tender space that nurtures community building through a world of shared creature-hood. Each performer re-animates Qi’s wearables, responding to visual and sonic waves through both movement and stillness. 

She approaches filmmaking like she does her paintings and collages, layering pieces to form unexpected combinations. Natural textures merge with traces of figures, animals, and flowing movement to create pulsating compositions of textural collage that flicker between abstraction and moments of visible performance. Her soundscapes that serve as the foundation for live performances and film are treated as a physical force: a being that slithers, crashes, and wraps around the body like a million invisible hands.

“We are never one thing. We are never even a thousand things. We are millions of things, compiled together. We are nothing and everything. We are free when we aren’t fixed. We are free when we become plural.”