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It’s not cold enough for the snow coming down outside to stick on the January afternoon I visit the multimedia artist Cheryll Leo-Gwin at her home in Redmond. She’s been having some heat-system problems the last few days amid the recent cold snap — at one point in our conversation we paused so that she could schedule an appointment to have that looked at — but her capacious and colorful studio radiates warmth, not just because it contains one of her house’s three fireplaces but because of Leo-Gwin herself, who laughs easily and often and whose enthusiasm for the art to which she’s devoted much of her life is infectious.

I met her a few days after she celebrated her 80th birthday and about two weeks after the conclusion of a lauded exhibit at Seattle’s Jack Straw Cultural Center. Called Larger Than Life, it encapsulates Leo-Gwin’s long-standing unwillingness to confine herself to one primary medium. It featured prints, recordings, animation, and sculptures informed by oral testimonials she collected from Chinese women living in the U.S. and in China. It also was supplemented with a podcast, Buried Alive, Leo-Gwin continues to work on that tells the story of the Misty Poets of China, a group of young artists and writers who, during China’s cultural revolution, riskily held underground salons as a means to connect. She’d written about five episodes when we spoke, with one more script to go. 

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