The Museum of Oriental Art of Venice offers its visitors an extraordinary encounter with the creative universe of the French-Chinese artist Li Chevalier.

I Hear the Water Dreaming is a monographic exhibition, curated by Paolo De Grandis and Carlotta Scarpa , which celebrates the intense artistic career of Li Chevalier through a selection of thirty ink on canvas works as a tribute to Venice, the city that changed the expressive path of the artist in the early nineties.

Born in China but raised in Europe since the 1980s, she graduated in Philosophy from the Sorbonne University in Paris and was a singer in the Orchester De Paris choir. Venice represents a strong bond for Li Chevalier since it was precisely in the lagoon city that he took his first Italian language lesson in order to best interpret bel canto. Soon after, fascinated by beauty and art, she began her extensive artistic training in Venice, then in Florence and Rome, exploring drawing, engraving and classical painting until achieving a post-graduate specialization in contemporary art at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London.

Living and working between Europe and Asia, Li Chevalier has chosen to reinterpret the technique of ink painting, an ancient Chinese medium often confined to a historical academic vision. This return to the Chinese tradition was a choice aimed "at comparing oriental plasticity with contemporary and European painting techniques".

His paintings on canvas are a harmonious and innovative union between Chinese ink and the very essence of the composition and specific materials of European painting: canvas, collage, texture. This combination then reveals his constant attention and reflection in comparing the oriental aesthetics cultivated over the centuries with a vision of the world made of doubt and redemption, humanism and solitude, which draws heavily on the sources of Western philosophy.