ART REVIEW : Leaning Closer to Euro-America Than Japan

Of the five Japanese-American contemporary artists showing at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (through July 31), only Nancy Uyemura pays an overt homage to the Japanese aesthetic and she was born right here in Santa Monica. The others are Japanese-born transplants, and their work is firmly rooted in the eclectic seedbed of Euro-American modernism. So much for generalizations.

Mitsuko Namiki shows tight puzzles of Gorky-like shapes hued in the primaries. The blue, yellow and red forms look like viscera or cartilage, but they’re corraled in a shallow space limiting the creepy, aquatic mobility that gives biomorphism its oozy appeal. With driving undulations of color that thunder from left to right, “Untitled 88 F” conjures up a horse. A gnarled gesture suggests a warrior in the same evocative way, but unfortunately Namiki cancels out her best canvas by affixing two out-of-the-blue toy horses.

Uyemura shows paintings and constructions that embed bits of Japanese rice paper and fabric in translucent washes of acrylic paint. “A Seasonal Turn” is typical. Uyemura divides a diamond into four parts with--you guessed it--soft violet and pink configurations for spring, spicy red and orange confetti for summer and so on. A genuine poetry runs through “Memory of Grandmother,” but large constructions that suspend antique chairs over similar stippled grounds look very contrived.

Katsu Yokoyama studied architecture in Japan. His gestural, veiled abstractions have the solid architectonic underpinnings of a Rothko or a Diebenkorn but translated through the misty atmospheric perspective of ancient Oriental landscape painting. The pieces--careful and meditative at worst, inventive and dramatic at best--repeat a lower horizontal band of dark blues or peacock greenish blacks or molten browns. This is followed by a band of neutral earthen tones that dissolves into smoldering formations worked at the edges into shiny beads of texture.

The two highlights of the show, photomontages by Koji Takei and delightful canvases by John Yoyogi Fortes, speak for themselves. An award winning graphic designer, Takei makes photos that merge the slick, unassailable taste of an expensive Madison Avenue ad with the warmth and intelligence we expect from fine art. He photographs toys, rocks, Indian summer skies, pristine architecture (what he can’t find, he builds) then combines them to make, for instance, a desert scene where a tiny toy car and dog have pulled up to watch the erection of a huge shopping bag cum skyscraper.

Fortes makes wonderful Angst -free primitive paintings in which furniture has little feet, crude Ionic columns sprout the tipsy triangular roofs of a kindergarten drawing and figures are the cartoony though slightly less obsessed protagonists of Francisco Clemente. If the look is guileless, the message is not, as in the very beautiful “Anointing the Dunce” where a female shaman blesses a clown.