ART REVIEW : Turner Exhibit at USC Atelier

It’s a peculiar art store within an upscale shopping mall. It’s a culture within a culture. But whatever else an exhibition called “Saigon, California” is, the work by Southern California artist Richard Turner and Vietnamese refugee Phi Loc is as discordant as conflicts in Southeast Asia.

Turner makes aggressive pastiches of conflicting East/West cultures, and Phi Loc shows naive paintings--scenes of Saigon in glistening lacquers, turned out as commercial decor for Vietnamese refugees, as well as expressionistic views of human terror. The resulting show, at USC Atelier in the Santa Monica Place shopping center (to Feb. 19), is an unsettling collection of questions.

Disruption is apparent everywhere as Turner inserts such American Pop heroes as James Dean and Charlie Parker into Saigon settings, places a bust of Caesar on a map of Vietnam (spray-painted on an animal hide) and frames paintings in a mixture of bamboo and gilded moldings.

Vestiges of classical Western art and architecture mingle uncomfortably with kitsch Oriental statuary. And Turner adopts a different style for each artwork: dripped white outlines on black cloth for his jazz bar scene called “Charlie Parker Plays the Olympic Bar,” crude illustration for “James Dean in Saigon.”

This stylistic melee lends the display an air of thrift-shop chaos, but the castoffs are individual people and whole villages, if not an entire country. One longs for a resolution in the art, which seems so conflicted that it’s difficult to tell whether Turner has willed it this way or simply hasn’t resolved his feelings on the matter.

If the latter is true, it’s understandable. Turner spent his high school years in the late ‘50s in Saigon and saw a shift from French to American domination. As a resident of Orange County, he has watched an influx of Vietnamese refugees into Westminster, now called Little Saigon. That’s where Phi Loc lives, and the ambiance of Vietnamese moderne shops served as Turner’s model for “Saigon, California.”

From an art historical point of view, Turner’s 15-year involvement with the theme of Asian-American interactions is a fascinating addition to a tradition. From the Ukiyo-E artists’ depictions of foreign barbarians in woodblock prints and the influence of Japanese printmakers on French Impressionists to today’s concern with Pacific Rim cross-fertilization, there has often been a moral undertone to the subject of foreign influence. By focusing on a sociopolitical catastrophe, Turner brings the theme into the open.