Rooms for Thought : Artist Kim Yasuda Uses 2 Large Galleries in a Search for Self

Some artists splash paint on canvas or sculpt forms out of clay to express insights or truths they’ve discovered. Kim Yasuda, on the other hand, transforms whole rooms into artworks in a personal search for self.

Born of Eurasian parents and adopted by second-generation Japanese-Americans, Yasuda has never met her natural mother and doesn’t know if her natural father is alive.

Her latest installation, on view starting Sunday at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, is an attempt to seek and define her cultural roots.

“There are lots of things I don’t know (about my past),” the Los Angeles artist said recently. “So I have to fabricate a whole history. That’s what I do with my art.”

The site-specific installation draws on what Yasuda does know about her roots: She had Japanese relatives who were fishermen and gardeners. In contrast, her natural Russian-Austrian father was an engineer and musician who lived a more acculturated existence.

It also taps into what she calls her “Hereditary Memory,” the title of the piece, which is instinctual information passed on genetically, she said.

“I’ve never been to Japan; I was raised in suburbia,” said Yasuda, 30, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. “But there are certain issues that indicate I have a hereditary memory that is not based on firsthand experience. It’s based on some sort of past lineage. You just have a sense of things.”

The Zen-like work, at once serene and powerful, takes up two large galleries, where Yasuda has placed objects sparingly, using empty, voluminous space as a key element.

In the first room, symbolizing her Japanese background, a bamboo fishing pole curves upward, its white nylon line stretching overhead to penetrate the vast, opposite wall through a tiny hole. Wooden letters on the floor--which extend beyond a glass wall to an outdoor courtyard--spell out a relevant quote from French theorist Gaston Bachelard.

A tall, Victorian-style gate leads into the next room, which embodies the artist’s “elevated” Western lineage. Sturdy black shoes dangle from clear monofilament in a DNA-like double helix. Like a huge, fancy necklace, two long strands of pearls hang from the ceiling against a wall. The first room’s fishing line connects to a small screen onto which the image of a bowing, kimono-clad woman is projected.

Like a visitor from another land, the woman, who appears to tug on the line each time she bows, “is a pull to the past,” Yasuda said.

Yasuda links her past and present, her diverse cultural threads, over and over by traversing barriers, just as she’s joined two rooms with a fishing line.

“Through generations, you lose connections with the past,” said the artist, who who has made installations about personal identity since 1988. “There are many lines here connecting things.”

Another bisected barrier is represented by a small, rectangular slot carved into a 1-foot-wide gallery partition, said Yasuda, who has fit a drawer into the slot.

The drawer’s glass base bears the words acquired and innate, relating, respectively, to the more formal gallery, where wealth and socialization have been acquired, and to the Eastern-themed gallery, which represents a more natural, “primary” existence, she said.

Like the title of Yasuda’s installation, the opposing concepts also relate to the Bachelard phrase, which describes how an incident experienced by the author’s grandfather essentially becomes part of the author’s own life:

“I know, for instance, that my grandfather got lost in a certain wood. I was told this, and I have not forgotten it. It happened in a past before I was born. My oldest memories, therefore, are a hundred years old, or perhaps a bit more.”

“We are each a composition of acquired experiences and innate information,” Yasuda said.

“Hereditary Memories,” an installation by Kim Yasuda, will be on view Sunday through June 2 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $3 for adults, $2 for students and seniors, $1 for children 6 to 17 years old. Information: (714) 759-1122.