ART : What’s Secret Message Behind Kim Masuda’s Works? Go Figure

Remember when virtually every celebrity was described by some gushing scribe as “a very private person”? An alleged desire to maintain a low public profile--regardless of actions to the contrary--apparently gave even the silliest starlet or muscle-bound hunk an aura of seriousness and accountability.

In art, however, privacy can be more of a stumbling block than a come-on. How close to the vest can artists play their cards without sending viewers away in bafflement and annoyance? Is it fair to cry foul when when an artist’s work leads the viewer on a wild goose chase that seems to yield disappointingly little substance? The issue is a delicate one, liable to be misunderstood. Art should give viewers a workout, but viewers also have a right to expect special rewards for their efforts.

At Newport Harbor Art Museum through June 2, the 19th installment of the “New California Artist” series is a large-scale installation called “Hereditary Memories” by Los Angeles artist Kim Yasuda.

This spacious but minimal piece contains such familiar objects as shoes, a fishing pole and pearls, displayed in rather odd and beguiling arrangements. But the big question is, is it worth the time to puzzle out the point of this pristine exercise? Regretfully, I’ve concluded the answer is: No .

It seemed possible at first to make some sense of the installation simply by trying to find family resemblances among its seemingly unrelated objects.

Two parts of the piece suggest the notion of passing through boundaries--perhaps boundaries of space and time. Bunched up wooden letters spell out a quotation that begins on the lobby floor and continues outside on the terrace. A long filament, attached to a fishing rod in the lobby, pokes through a gallery wall.

Other objects seem to invoke the concepts of tradition and formality. The entryway to the gallery is framed by a formal wrought-iron garden gate. Projected on a screen placed on the floor--so viewers must bow to see it--a film loop shows a woman in a simple kimono making a slow, deep bow.

The fishing rod--which also “bows” under the tension of the taut filament--represents a traditional Japanese livelihood. Two velvet jewelers’ busts placed high on a wall hold an immensely long loop of pearls, which are formal women’s wear and also a traditional product of Japan.

Another part of the installation literally spells out the twin factors in human development. Two open drawers, on either side of a wall, reveal different messages. In one drawer, the word innate can be read through a mirror (the mirror-writing suggests the way innate qualities are “encoded” within the human mind from birth). The other drawer holds a piece of glass etched with the word acquired .

After observing these things, however, I still couldn’t quite put my finger on the central meaning of the piece.

The illustrated exhibit brochure by assistant curator Marilu Knode, available in the museum shop, offered more information. (It costs $3, which seems unfair in view of the lack of any explanatory wall text and the fact that visitors have to pay to enter the museum in the first place.)

The brochure explains that Yasuda is the child of Eurasian parents who was adopted by a second-generation Japanese-American couple. Her fascination with heredity and personal identity in her art is understandably rooted in the riddle of her own origins.

Knode writes that the title of this piece comes from a description in “The Book of Tea” by Kakuzo Okakura, a turn-of-the-century Japanese scholar who described the unchanging character of tea leaves through centuries of tea-making as “hereditary memories.”

The text spelled out on the floor--about storytelling and memory as a link with the life of one’s ancestors--is an excerpt from French scientific philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s “The Poetics of Space.”

According to Knode, Yasuda “selects objects that refer to human presence or absence” and “retain the aura of their former lives.” Her Zen-influenced approach to making art is meant to draw on “the intuitive capabilities of the audience,” and to evoke to “the space beyond our view.”

Well, that may be, but we can’t be expected to read Yasuda’s mind. At the same time, we do have a right to expect all the details of the piece to cohere into something larger than the sum of the parts. One misstep--a banal image, a fuzzy thought--and the whole thing goes up in smoke.

Yasuda recently told an interviewer that, in the absence of much concrete knowledge about her forebears, “I have to fabricate a whole history. That’s what I do with my art.”

In this piece, however, she leans too hard on the Bachelard quote as a validation of her beliefs rather than supplying an equivalent epiphany of her own--either about her imagined past or about her activity of thinking about the past. Alive with imaginative possibilities at first look, the installation eventually proves superficial and vague.

Yasuda hasn’t sufficiently developed her fleeting references to specific cultural “memories” (the bowing person in the film, the fishing pole, the garden gate). It’s simply not reasonable to expect viewers to do this work on their own. The objects she has chosen have many possible contexts. It’s up to her to delimit these contexts.

The most visually captivating part of the piece is the spiral of men’s shoes--each one creased with wear--that starts from a point in midair and journeys upward to the ceiling. Yet this image ultimately seems more attractive than meaningful.

Lavishing painstaking attention on minute details of presentation, Yasuda seems to have overlooked the need to invest the work as a whole with a conceptual program that is both more accessible and more richly rewarding to the viewer. Still feeling her way as an artist at the youthful age of 30, she undermines her fanciful tableau by making disappointingly sketchy and arbitrary connections between one thing and another.

“New California Artist XIX: Kim Yasuda” continues through June 2 at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $3 general, $2 for students and seniors, $1 for children 6 to 17, free for everyone on Tuesdays. (714) 759-1122.