DENOISE

Denoise began with bodily experiences of hearing loss, persistent tinnitus, and hearing tests. The audiogram was the first external structure to translate what could previously only be felt by the body into frequencies, thresholds, and curves. Bai does not treat the chart as a medical conclusion; instead, he uses it as a structure through which a private sensation can begin to enter forms that can be recorded, compared, and remade.

As he learned to live with tinnitus, meditation and inward listening gradually became part of his daily life. The audiogram also shifted from a medical record into a working structure. Bai continually collects everyday sounds and feeds them into custom software built around his hearing-test chart. The sounds drive a changing image in real time, generating lines, waveforms, and diagrams. From these results he selects, crops, and recombines fragments, then builds them onto canvas through a sustained, day-by-day process of hand drawing. Painting is not a direct copy of software output, but the point at which human judgement re-enters the translation: what is retained, covered, layered, or stopped is decided again through the body and through time.

In exhibition versions, Bai adds shamanic drums to the same software system as a live input. The drum surfaces combine cowhide with CNC-cut aluminium symbol structures. Visitors’ strikes are captured through contact microphones and fed into the program, driving the image on screen in real time. At the same time, the sounds are recorded, stored, and later returned to the space at random. A sound heard in the present may therefore come from another visitor’s earlier action, creating shifting relations between a current strike, the changing image, and a sound from the past. The drums are not a separate mechanism from the paintings, but another source of sound and participation within the same system of translation once it enters the exhibition space.

Through repeated translation and manual accumulation, the paintings gradually develop structures resembling PCB traces. The resemblance is not a direct depiction of circuit boards; it emerges through the interaction of software, materials, and manual choice, while also resonating with the electronics manufacturing and circuitry familiar from Bai’s long experience of Shenzhen. Regional experience does not become a thematic label here; it enters through material sensibility, structure, and habits of judgement.

Denoise uses the same software to work with sound in different situations. In the studio, everyday sounds are translated into images that are then selected, altered, and manually layered into paintings. In the exhibition space, visitors’ strikes on the shamanic drums drive the image in real time, while recording, waiting, and random replay return earlier sounds to the room. The program is not an endpoint but an intermediate structure through which bodily perception, sound, image, labour, and live action move into one another. The work retains the displacement, covering, delay, and residue produced by these translations, allowing experience to keep changing across media and time.