And Now Art Pops Up on the Billboards : Urban scene: A firm that lobbied against signboard curbs is a co-sponsor of the exhibit.

High above an Encino mini-mall loomed the strangest billboard on Ventura Boulevard, a sign that featured two icons of mass appeal: Mao Tse-tung and Colonel Sanders.

Down below, Westec Security guards Scott Rice and Jim Miller stood beside their patrol cars, waiting for crime to strike. Why, Rice wondered, did the colonel have a red circle and a slash across his face? Seemed an odd way to sell fried chicken.

“I don’t get it,” Rice said.

“I think it’s trying to say something,” Miller ventured, “that nobody’s going to understand.” Later, Miller noted Warholian influences in the billboard.

Whatever artist May Sun’s intent, her mammoth canvas is getting an extraordinary audience. Every day for the past month, thousands of motorists have driven past the original artwork that is 48 feet wide and 14 feet high. If it gives them pause, if it makes them think, that’s all the artist asks.

In a metropolis of drive-by shootings and drive-through everything, Sun and her patrons call this “drive-by art.” Not unlike Mao and Colonel Sanders, Sun and her patrons are trying to reach the masses.

Sun’s work is one of three such billboard originals now on exhibit amid the cluttered, crassly commercialized urbanscape of Los Angeles. All are scheduled to be moved this week.

“The Chairman and the Colonel” will go from its Ventura Boulevard and Woodley Avenue location to 1st and Main streets downtown. Another that features a crawling Abraham Lincoln and some oblique political commentary (“Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful”) will go from Hollywood Boulevard at Cherokee Avenue to the Hollywood Freeway at Highland. The third, an apolitical paean titled “Remember Your First Love?” will go from Lincoln Boulevard and 83rd Street in Westchester to Sherman Way and Lindley Avenue in Reseda.

“So much of the time art is separated from the public--in museums, galleries. You have to go there. This is bringing it to the public. . . . The idea is to expand what art can mean to people,” said Jinger Heffner, spokeswoman for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), which co-sponsored the program with Patrick Media, the nation’s largest billboard advertising firm.

“It’s advertising promoting artists, and artists promoting the advertising medium,” said Lynn Eberhard, a Patrick Media art director. “It works both ways.”

Patrick Media derives public relations benefits in the program--and the billboard industry can use it. Critics see Patrick Media, which owns 7,000 signboards in Southern California, as a culprit in the battle against billboard blight.

Ed Dato, director of public affairs for the company, lobbied against a 1988 city measure proposed by Councilman Marvin Braude that would have prohibited the construction of new billboards. The measure failed on an 8-7 vote.

“I don’t think this (art billboard program) would ever change Marvin Braude. But I think it has influence with people interested in promoting art in L.A.,” Dato said.

The current show represents the second year of collaboration between LACE and Patrick Media. In a previous public art program run by Patrick Media in Texas, the company simply reproduced on a large scale a small selection of existing artworks. In Los Angeles, LACE organized a competition seeking entries expressly created for the outdoor medium.

A panel of artists and officials selected the winners from about 200 entries. The billboard company paid winners $750 and provided their own staff artists to produce the billboards. The works will be on display for four months, periodically shifting locations.

The medium provides special problems for the artist, said Daniel Martinez. A judge in the current competition, Martinez was a winner the previous year.

For one thing, artists must reach a public that is inured to a bombardment of commercial images. Getting their attention is a challenge.

“People drive by and they get a latent image. Maybe they’ll catch a glimpse of something in the corner of their eye and they’ll think, ‘What was that?’ ” he said.

Martinez’s billboard was a rousing personal success. Titled “Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds You,” it featured two ferocious-looking dogs poised around a small human hand ladling tomato sauce onto a plate of meat loaf. The title, Martinez said, was ironic: “To me it means maybe sometimes you should bite the hand that feeds you.”

A French curator took note and included Martinez’s billboard in a touring show that features Latino artists of Los Angeles. Most recently, Martinez’s billboard was displayed outside an art museum in Barcelona.

Two winners--Sun’s “The Chairman and the Colonel” and “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful,” by Victor Henderson and Elizabeth Garrison--borrow overtly from the advertising medium. Whereas Sun uses the image of Colonel Sanders, Henderson and Garrison borrow the text of a shampoo advertisement that features a model of striking pulchritude. Sun, who was born in Shanghai, grew up in Hong Kong and moved to California as a teen-ager, said her work reflects more her “searching and questioning” than her opinions.

The original inspiration, she said, was a newspaper article describing the opening of the first American fast-food emporium in China--a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Tian An Men Square directly opposite Mao’s mausoleum. Student protesters had taken over the square when she finished her original concept. Like the finished product, it featured Mao in reverse black-and-white tones, like a photographic negative. But there was no slash across the colonel’s face.

“I was going to title it ‘Democracy: It’s Finger-Lickin’ Good,”’ Sun recalled.

But after Chinese troops killed more than 700 protesters, the work “seemed too flippant,” Sun said. “So I put the banned sign across the colonel’s face and tried to make Mao look more sinister.” Look closely and you see Mao giving the colonel a suspicious glance.

Henderson and Garrison say their depiction of an apologetic Abraham Lincoln on all fours is meant to have many levels of interpretation.

Henderson said that, for him, it represents a vain America in decline, apologizing for its position in the world. But Garrison said she “even heard a fascist interpretation--that America has been on its knees for too long.”

Meanwhile, “Remember Your First Love?” makes no attempt at ambiguity. Artist Tomata DuPlenty said he wants to reach the heart more than the mind.

On his giant canvas are four images laid out like a comic strip. From the left, the first is a farm boy holding a lamb, then a grandmother knitting, then a teen-age girl slow-dancing with her boyfriend, then a sailor sipping a beer. (The sailor, DuPlenty explained, is dreaming about adventure.) Across the top is the word “Remember” and across the bottom is “Your First Love?”

“Pretty hokey, huh?” DuPlenty said with a laugh. Born with a name he declined to reveal, DuPlenty used to be the lead singer in the punk rock band The Screamers. He admits to having mellowed, to becoming “a gentleman.”

“People have enough seriousness in their lives today. The whole idea of it,” DuPlenty said of his billboard, “is to just let people give themselves a break.”