Wilshire Center

Kai Bob Cheng makes technically complex art, historically smart paintings and constructions. There’s a Blaue Reiter horse and mount and a giant surrealist bone in “Portrait of a Winged Vertebrae,” there’s the American Precisionists’ fracturing of the canvas in “Sing the Serengeti,” a nicely limned, stroboscopic compilation of the wildlife and feel of the African plains. An obvious kin to Charles Demuth’s “I Saw the Figure Five” becomes a cluttered, fast-stepping record of a New York sojourn in Cheng’s “Jazz at the Five Spot.” We see illusionistically receding train tracks, lettering identifying Lexington Avenue, clusters of actual toy train tracks, parts of string instruments and archeological artifacts lodged in the four-inch depth of this construction. “Venice View” has a nostalgic poetry with its painted vista of the rarely quiet boardwalk in Venice set against actual washed-up beach detritus coiled in wire and aged seaweed. (Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, 7416 Beverly Blvd., to March 30.)