Questions of control, the fragile reality of dreamscapes, and a longing for protection infuse Summoning the Wind, a multimedia exhibition by Qian Li at the Erie Art Museum, on view September 5, 2024 through January 2025. Two video installations and a selection of paintings, most on rice paper or silk, fill the museum’s main gallery space.

Li was born in Qingdao, China, and received a BFA from what is now the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing. She earned her MFA at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and is a professor at Cleveland State University. Her work—ranging from painting and mixed media to digital printing, video, and interactive installations—has been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her site-specific video installations have included multimedia works for events at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Ingenuity Festival, and a permanent work commissioned by Cuyahoga Community College for their Technology Learning Center.

She has received Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council in 2008 and 2015, was a CAN Triennial Winner in 2022, and was named a Distinguished Art Alumni from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Li is active in introducing contemporary Chinese art to American audiences, curating and presenting an exhibit of new Chinese painting at the Galleries at CSU in 2015.

Li’s work uses abstraction to explore personal and societal issues, and is rooted in her identity as a Chinese woman living in the United States. In Summoning the Wind, the tensile strength of remembered dreams drives Li, who has dipped into her subconscious for over thirty years for inspiration, meticulously recording dreams in a stack of journals that she laughingly thinks about throwing away, but to which she returns to make sense of the world.

“As a person in this modern age, I feel like don’t have a lot of control,” says Li. “My dreamscapes are places when I can amass things and control them. They are connected to my past, rooted in childhood, and hold a lot of my wishes.”

Growing up on the eastern coast of China, Li found solace in nature, often sneaking out of the house, where she had been locked while her parents were working, to visit the unique stacked rocks of a nearby beach. She endured two serious accidents before she was eleven; these shadowy, strong traumas flicker throughout her range of work.

“As an interdisciplinary artist, I weave together personal narratives with universal themes, bridging the gap between individual experiences and collective concerns,” says Li. “Drawing from my upbringing in a Chinese coastal village and my journey of raising a biracial family in the United States, I am deeply intrigued by the delicate dance between opposing forces. My creative vision often springs from the realm of dreams, infusing my narratives with a sense of mystery and fluidity across time.”

Laura Domencic, executive director of the Erie Art Museum, agrees. “There’s a sort of poetry in this kind of dreamscape language,” says Domencic. “And there’s a certain level of control and letting go in thinking about the materials used: letting the material do what the material does, then adding the precision of the paint. It’s an interesting interaction of power dynamics on a micro level.”

Li’s investigation of control extends to craving a superpower that will not only summon the wind—a metaphor she takes from Chinese culture, where it represents amazing strength and power—but will also protect that which she loves: her family and the natural world. The exhibit’s two video installations explore concepts of protection, influenced by Li’s experience during COVID-19, her heightened awareness of the gun violence at large in the world, and her concern over climate change.

“For a while, in my imagination, I built a suit for my daughter; a perfect, transparent bubble for her to wear like a suit,” Li says, both arms outstretched in an embrace. “I think a lot about protection—of my child, and of nature. The environment is being over-damaged by humans. We should just be a part of it, instead of influencing and destroying it.”

Images of the protective suit appear both onscreen and in paintings; those stalwart rocks from Qingdao Beach are featured on silk, a medium usually reserved in Chinese painting for delicate flowers, rather than monolithic rocks.

But Li also turns outward in Summoning the Wind—she invites viewers to participate and illustrate their dreamscapes. Sheets of paper, marked with a horizon line, await the dreams and stories that gallery visitors want to share. Li hopes to collect them throughout the show, arrange and shoot them as a video, and post the resulting collaborative work on her YouTube channel.

“I want the viewer to be involved, to draw their dream worlds or cities on paper at the show. Dreams have influenced me greatly. I thought it would be interesting for people to look back into themselves—to slow them down, in a way, and see what they dream. Often the dream state shows conflict; visually, two different forces are interacting. Sometimes, after you think about it and paint it, it’s gone. You’ve released a certain tension.”

The Erie Art Museum is located at 20 East 5th Street, Erie, Pennsylvania, 16507 (entrance between State Street and French Street). Open 11 am to 6 pm Wednesday through Friday, 10 am to 5 pm Saturday, 1 to 6 pm Sunday. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Admission: Adults – $10, Senior Citizens and Students – $8; with Access EBT Card – $2 (up to four adults per card). Free to members, active-duty military with ID, and children under 16.