O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Bowers Exhibits: All Show, No Tell : The reopened Santa Ana museum unlocks a jewelry box of pre-Columbian gold and Chinese ceramic, but there are no keys to the cultures that produced the works.

It’s blockbuster blather time at the newly reopened Bowers Museum. Titles of the two traveling exhibits on view, “Tribute to the Gods: Treasures of the Museo del Oro” and “Chinese Art: Masterpieces of the Chang Foundation, Taipei” contain the two evergreen words in the lexicon of museum marketing folk: treasures and masterpieces. To the seasoned museum-goer, these words have come to mean “proceed with skepticism.”

In an interview last year, Bowers Director Peter C. Keller said: “It’s the changing exhibits you can bring in from all around the world that keep the interest up in an institution. What’s new? Treasures from where? It’s what keeps your membership going. It’s what brings people back. . . . Why go back to the same old thing?”

Why, indeed. But now that the dowager Bowers has a bigger, spiffier house to fill with paying visitors, we can only hope she isn’t going to offer her guests a steady diet of fancy, high-calorie dishes in place of the “brain food” that gives a museum its educational credentials. Of the two exhibitions, the gold show gets higher marks, but both fall short of constituting a rewarding experience in cross-cultural communication.

“Tribute to the Gods” consists of 340 delicate-looking pre-Columbian gold body adornments and other objects (including ceramic pieces) from several distinct regions of Colombia, collected by the Museum of Gold in Bogota, an institution established in 1939 by the Banco de la Republica, the country’s central bank.

The first thought liable to strike a contemporary viewer who might have expected drop-dead razzle-dazzle is the charmingly homespun quality of a number of the delicate gold pieces. Among the most appealing are the body ornaments made in such prehistoric southwestern regions as Calima and Quimbaya: hammered sheets of gold nearly as crumple-prone as tinfoil, decorated by embossing or tiny beading (granulation).

Some of these pieces--like the wing-shaped nose ornament in Early Calima Style that could be a patient kid’s summer-camp project--are supplied with ragged little dangling parts that would tinkle softly as the wearer moved.

In contrast, the Sinu region in the north produced solid objects made of cast gold, like the abstract anthropomorphic pendant in a style known as “Darien.” Imposing in a heraldic way, the shaman figure sports two gleaming gold knobs on his head, clutches two batons in rigidly symmetrical formation and wears tight rows of gold spirals as crisp as the braid on a dress uniform.

Dressed in full regalia--for a ritual event--a pre-Columbian fellow might wear a large ornament hanging from his nostrils and stretching across his cheeks, a pectoral covering his chest, lip plugs and curling ear ornaments, not to mention necklaces and bracelets. Of course, any follower of fashion understands the concept of enduring discomfort in the name of a higher goal.

Sumptuous ornaments worn thousands of years ago were prestige items, just as they are today, though only members of the political or religious elite were on top of the heap. (Speaking of customs of the elite, an exhibit of gold--the object of Spanish colonial greed--seems a peculiarly insensitive way of marking the quincentenary, a conquest that effectively wiped out the indigenous gold-crafting cultures.)

Unlike the Spaniards, however, the pre-Columbians viewed gold not as a commodity but as the “sweat of the sun,” a tangible sign of the source of life. They also believed that if you wear the image of a mythical animal, you could appropriate some of its power. (For example, the butterfly-shaped nose ornaments made by the Tairona people of the northern coast turned the wearer’s mouth into a jaguar’s snout.) On some pieces, the figures are also shown wearing jewelry of their own, creating the mind-boggling vision of an infinitely receding chain of transmuted power.

Other objects in the exhibit were apparently used as funerary or votive offerings, like the zealously detailed anthropomorphic figures from the Muisica region of the high plateaus in central Colombia. On their flat little bodies, skinny coils of gold delineate hair, facial features, limbs and jewelry with the inventive ease of a witty doodle.

Ideally, a visitor to an anthropological museum like the Bowers should be able to view the objects in an exhibit not just as attractive or interesting things in themselves but also as keys to an entire culture.

Wall texts (so dimly lit last week, unfortunately, that they could be read only with difficulty) do explain geographic differences in symbolism and technical methods between the pieces. (No time line or dating system is offered, however. If the pieces can’t be dated, then we need to know why.)

But one difficulty with the “jewel-box” display methods that have become routine everywhere is that they effectively isolate objects as pretty trinkets and disconnect them from their culturally complex and resonant past. Part of the problem might have been solved if the gold show were directly linked--by physical proximity or some other means--to the Bowers’ more fully realized exhibition of pre-Columbian work from its own collection.

The text in the attractively illustrated exhibit catalogue--written by the director and assistant director of the Museo del Oro--walks the viewer briskly through each of the gold-working regions of ancient Colombia. Dryly enumerating agricultural and religious customs, with references to the anthropological literature, this text begs for a sensitive editor--or for a Chapter Two that would treat the subject from a broader, more leisurely perspective (perhaps with a discussion of symbols of value in other cultures).

Incidentally, one drawback of the four new temporary exhibit galleries that becomes apparent when you walk through them is the lack of buffer space. The galleries are so close to one another that there is no clear spatial indication of the conclusion of one exhibit and the beginning of another.

The unstructured flow of traffic might be considered symbolic of a world without borders, but it also promotes disorientation and the discouraging feeling that an important feature of the “museum experience” probably fell victim to budgetary constraints.

The Chinese exhibition really is not about anything in particular except showing off some of the objects collected by one Taiwanese industrialist and his family.

That’s not the same thing as putting together an exhibit based on a point of view about Chinese art and culture. It’s also not the same as assembling an exhibition simply to show off the fabled holdings of a distant or inaccessible museum (like the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, or the Barnes Foundation in Merion Station, Penn.). The fledgling Chang Foundation does not occupy such an exalted rank.

The show zaps through the history of Chinese ceramics, from the Neolithic period to the late 18th Century. More like a commercial-gallery showroom than a museum exhibit, this display offers no information about the different aesthetics, manufacturing processes and cultural contexts involved. Silence reigns equally over the selection of paintings by three significant early 20th-Century Chinese artists.

Anyone who turns for assistance to the catalogue will find only a picture book in which each object is illustrated in full color--rather like a ritzy auction catalogue. The only text consists of a skimpy 3 1/2-page introduction to the ceramics by foundation curator James N. Spencer, a former employee of Christie’s, the international auction house.

The painters get even shorter shrift: brief biographies that read as though they were hastily translated from a Chinese reference book. There’s not a word about the specific works on view. So much for illuminating one of the world’s great traditions of connoisseurship.

The scarcity of exhibits of Chinese art in Southern California does keep the exhibit from being a total disappointment. Even the uninstructed eye can dwell with some

pleasure on the tomb sculpture of a plump, self-satisfied-looking Tang Dynasty (AD 618-906) lady in flowing robes, the restrained elegance of a white-glazed Song Dynasty (AD 960-1280) porcelain basin used in a courtly setting, or the vernacular charm of crouching tiger “pillow,” crafted during the same era to please more ordinary folks.

Still, we look to the Bowers to place such works in a cultural context. What does it mean, for example, that the top of the tiger pillow is covered in calligraphy? Does it reflect the phenomenon of greatly increased literacy during the Song Dynasty? If we are not to see these objects merely as attractive “collectibles,” we need to know how they filled the needs and expressed the beliefs of their societies.

In Chinese painting--which advances by looking backward to a formidably illustrious past--an artist finds his own style by reinterpreting a standard theme. When 40-year-old Fu Baoshi painted “Enjoying Scenery with a Lute,” in 1943, he used a theme employed by centuries of Chinese artists: scholars contemplating an immense landscape.

Certain aspects of the work are standard in Chinese painting, such as the way the mountains gradually grow more spectral as they ascend and become harder to see clearly. But Fu’s dry-brushed pale brown and gray mountains assume idiosyncratic, blocky, L-shaped forms that gradually decompose as they rise off the top of the paper.

Qi Baishi, a peasant born in 1863 who didn’t start studying painting (and poetry, an allied art form in China) until he was in his late 20s, was an immensely popular artist who tended to focus on small-scale subjects. An indefatigable traveler in China during his middle years, Qi settled in Peking in 1912 and began working in a more personal, broader style that became his trademark.

A couple of years later, he painted “Sailing Boats in Stormy Waves.” This very pared-down composition consists of a loose and irregular stack of gray horizontal swipes of the brush, revealing the white of the paper in many places. Looking like random Chinese characters that have wandered away from a poem, the black boats are scattered and submerged in the choppy gray water.

Qi’s “Mountain Cottage After Rain,” from 1932, shows how convincingly he could render states of nature in an abbreviated style. Manipulating a wet brush and ink to produce a range of grays and blacks, he evokes the damp earth, the lustrous leaves on the trees, the soaked rooftops and even the moisture-laden, foggy air.

Wu Changshuo, born in 1844, was the senior of the three artists. Like Fu and Qi, he was a so-called “individualist,” who infused his observations of nature and deep debt to art history with a willful personal vision.

In a painting of grapes from 1926, when Wu was an old man of 83, he blends green and rose ink into an indescribable hue suggestive of the cycle of ripening and decay. His dry-brushed gray grape vines skitter over the paper in an exuberant dance. Wu noted in an inscription on the painting that its style was in imitation of Wu Wei (a 15th-Century painter with a boldly personal style), but concluded with winning modesty that he has “not achieved a convincing likeness, and no wonder!”

“Tribute to the Gods: Treasures of the Museo del Oro” (through March 1) and “Chinese Art: Masterpieces of the Chang Foundation, Taipei” (on view indefinitely) are at the Bowers Museum, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: $4.50 adults, $3 seniors and students with ID, and $1.50 children under 12. (714) 567-3600.