When it comes to creating work, multidisciplinary artist Qidong Bai operates with an experimental approach through a variety of mediums to bring her ideas and personal expressions forward. She recently completed a body of work for a group show that focused around her conscious awareness of minor shifts in a given environment as time transitions. We met up with Bai to learn more about her work and processes she takes in making work.  
  

 

:qidong bai 

 

 

 

"I’ve been told my work can come off as being a bit vague at times and I don’t know if it’s a bad thing or not but I don’t mind it being that way actually. I think “vague” for me is a good thing. It gives people space to bring themselves in it. There are no limitations to the work. It gives people this freedom to think and look at the piece however they want."

 

 

Public Parking: Speak a bit about what you were interested in when you were going into your current body of work.

Qidong Bai: For this project I started to think about how modern production, industrialization, and city planning related to my city back in China. I came to Canada when I was around 18 and that place has obviously changed incredibly ever since. I can remember when my dad will drive me to school and I’ll see all these trees and plants along the way. People there called the city Green City but know there are a number of factories running there and a lot of city planning happening which have affected the air quality there so I got some friends and family back home to record the air condition every day from the same spot for a whole month. The work I ended up with is just a recording of the weather condition for the entire month of February this year. There are two days missing because they forgot to record it.

 

 

PP: Where did this idea to use the month as a form of measurement of the air quality back in your hometown come from?

QB: Ever since I moved to Canada I haven’t been able to go to China that much, I think the last time I was there was probably two years ago and I remember on my way back to Winnipeg, the flight laid over in Vancouver, and when I got off I immediately recognized the big difference in the air quality in comparison to where I was just 12hrs prior. That shift really said with me. The air was much nicer and clear. When you breathed it was so fresh. And I said to myself I was always going to remember that moment so that is how this work was kind of inspired by.  
 
PP: So how long have you been in Canada since you moved?

QB: I think five years now
 

 

 

PP: Having been in Canada for quite a while know and immersed in the culture in Canada and North America, it seems like your interests still lies back in China

QB: Yes, I think I will always think of that place and I think it will show up in my work sometimes. But this is the first time in a while I’ve done work directly about my hometown. I typically stay away from doing work directly about nationality. I like to make work from my personal perspective.
 
PP: Do you find your work being influence by being in Canada?

QB: At first it was because I was still learning the language here and I made work about my insecurities about speaking in English. I made work about my crossover of the language I knew before and the language I had to learn and speak in my new environment so I guess that is how being in Canada has influence my past work.

 

 

 

PP: What kind of reception have you received on the work? It seems like work about the environment being degraded by human activity especially in places like China has been talked about by artists, activist and writers... were you concerned that you weren’t adding anything new to the conversation?

QB: Yeah, when I initially proposed this work, a lot of the feedback was kind of similar to your question but overall I approached this work by doing it from my own perspective; how my family and friends experience the environment there. So I try to present it in a way that did not come off as too direct about what it’s about so in a way I left the content more open.
 
PP: Do you typically think about making work in a way that does come off as clearly evident as to what the concepts are?

QB: I’ve been told my work can come off as being bit vague and I don’t know if it’s a bad thing or not but I don’t mind it being that way actually. I think “vague” for me is a good thing. It gives people space to bring themselves in it. There are no limitations to the work. It gives people this freedom to think and look at the piece however they want.

 

 

PP: And I think your pieces fairly fall in between mediums as well…they are not quite sculptures, they hang on the way but it’s not quite two-dimensional either, and you use pastel as well…so there’s drawing involved too…

QB: Yeah, its typically been referred to as an installation. But up till now I still don’t know the meaning of what an installation really is. But yeah it’s a mix of media. I wanted to describe visually how the sky looked like each day during the month so I referred to traditional drawing and painting which is why I used the pastel to create the gradients and shades related to how the sky looked. And I included gear and mechanic parts to them as a reference to the industrial aspect of town. The gears keep spinning at every hour of the day it is just like those factories. It’s this ongoing cycle of the environment being degraded.

 

 

PP: You didn’t get to have an arts education in China, how do you think your knowledge of art will differ from what you know now.

QB: Well I have a cousin in China who was interested in going to art school and it's very strict and traditional. Technique is very important to them, students are typically thought to improve on their technique and less about the content of the work. But if you only know technique you won’t last long. But at the same time that way of thinking is changing as more and more artists are pushing forward ideas of how work can be made. 
 
 
PP: Do you find there’s an influence from western art forms in the work that lean more towards contemporary from China?

QB: Yeah definitely there’s a lot of performance and conceptual work which I guess is from the west but the content is about issues and interest of Chinese people.

 

Install of Sky Calendar pieces.