ART REVIEW : ‘EAST/WEST:’ A COLLISION OF CULTURES

The flesh and the spirit, the old and the new, the yin and the yang--sweet dreams are made of this, and so is an exhibition called “East/West” at Pomona College’s Montgomery Gallery, through Sunday.

A survey of 11 Los Angeles artists of Asian heritage, “East/West” includes work in a variety of media and presents a number of metaphors that allude to the collision of East and West. Some of the work, for instance, examines the conflict between nature and society. The bulk of it, however, addresses the conflict between spiritual need and earthly desire--and I needn’t tell you which camp the West represents.

The dominant characteristics attributed to the Asian sensibility are serenity, harmony, flexibility; the West, on the other hand, is saddled with the image of a culture that defaces nature without a second thought and is made up of spoiled children with the attention span of fleas. It’s no surprise that the central thrust of this thought-provoking exhibition is the need for Eastern spirituality in the face of the plastic assault presently being waged by the West. Of course, the Asian sensibility is far too subtle to speak in a blustering tone and this show suggests rather than bellows its point of view.

Work by the best known of these artists, Masami Teraoka, often is said to take a satirical poke at the collision of East and West, but Teraoka embraces this incongruous marriage with a degree of enthusiasm and finds much about the situation to be sexy and funny. Updating the traditional Japanese woodblock style known as Ukiyo-e by using it to depict contemporary scenes, Teraoka is represented here by a series based on the element of water. We see snorkeling geishas and are invited to consider the fact that modern scuba gear, ugly and ungainly though it is, has made the ancient wonders of the deep more accessible.

Water is also a central element in Kyoko Asano’s highly poetic paintings. In “Ancient Song,” a soft, gauzy dream rendered in pale pastels, we see a tide pool where lovingly painted garbage mingles with beautiful bits of nature. Water dribbles into view yet again in the exhibition’s centerpiece, a large sculptural installation by Mineko Grimmer. Titled “Incantations,” the piece is essentially a musical instrument built around two small structures vaguely resembling pagodas. Suspended in the center of each structure is an inverted pyramid of pebbles frozen in ice. As the ice melts, the pebbles fall, striking a web of bamboo in one, a web of taut piano wire in the other. Structured around the laws of nature, the song this piece sings is lovely.

Paintings by Han Xin straddle the two disparate cultures most successfully. An image of a fortress gate, “Forbidden City I,” is rendered with a brazen juiciness that puts one in mind of Jasper Johns even as it evokes exotic visions of Imperial China. George Di Marco’s oil, wax and metal abstractions grew out of his memories of his Japanese grandmother (her Buddhist prayer shrine in particular), while Kazuko Mathews’ massive wall sculpture, assembled out of sections of raku clay, is distinctly Eastern in its patterning and simplicity.

Sunglee Suki Lee cites composer Philip Glass and archeological digs as reference points in her heavily layered oil and charcoal images. “Rubric” has the rough quality of a primitive cave painting, while the work next to it, “The Photographer,” looks like a piece of stained glass. A rather schizophrenic series, this, but aesthetic schizophrenia is one of the ideas being explored here.

The most irreverent works on view are mixed-media collaborations by photographer Patrick Nagatani and painter Andree Tracey. Their elaborately staged photographs and tableaux look with gallows humor at the chaos the West has unleashed on an old, highly evolved culture, first with the bomb, then with rock ‘n’ roll and McDonald’s. We see interiors convulsing with pollution wafting in through windows overlooking nightmarish industrial landscapes.

“Shangi-L.A.” is a lurid collage of the L.A. tourist circuit, while objects speed through space as though propelled by a nuclear blast in “Red Piece.” “34th and Chambers” plunges us into a New York subway car that is packed with crazy people, tired people and angry people. A whirlwind of fast food swirls around the head of an awed Asian child in a sculptural installation titled “Golden Temple.” The child’s eager look at that flying burger reminds us that we all share a bit of the blame for the corruption of the world; the East does seem to have an unhealthy appetite for the perverted modern opiates cooked up by the wicked witch of the West.