ART REVIEW : Women Take on New World Disorder

Artists working through the new world disorder are on view in Cal State Northridge’s gallery exhibition “The Chinese Heritage: Five Contemporary Perspectives.”

All participants make art about as accomplished as that of good graduate students, all are women, two born here, the rest in China. The latter are all still deeply enmeshed in the traditions of Chinese art and the problems of reifying it with an expanding world.

Baohong Cheng’s “The Spirit and Soul of China” uses familiar ink-wash drawing to run through the periods and manners of Chinese art from cave painting to calligraphy, from the naive sweetness of female court musicians to the bravura rendering of a warrior. There is little of the present save a slight loosening of technique and a sense of history.

De-Cai Jian’s montages of weathered peasant faces reflect the social reality in her country. Her dark, wrinkled-hill landscapes move close to Western abstraction. Shiyan Zhang’s work could be fantasy art anywhere save for subjects like the Great Wall rendered in metallic paint and glitter. One image causes a double take. What looks like a big petrified tree turns monstrous when we see tiny bicyclists and buildings beneath its oppressive branches.

Not surprisingly, the two American-born artists lean to conceptualism.

L.A. native Betty Wan presents a cubbyhole room installation, “Orientation 9.” Both hermetic and poetic, it’s entered through a low circular portal and centered around the shape of a cookie-cutter female silhouette rendered in black pebbles. Surrounding it are baskets and wooden boxes festooned with small precious objects that speak to intimate and cherished memory. It obliquely brings to mind the art of both Betye Saar and Alexis Smith.

Betty Lee presents a photo-collage suite called “An Abbreviated Notation on Barbaric Nature.” Each sheet shows contrasting but linked images with titles like “Immigrant/Invader” or “Soldier/Warrior.” Lee’s theme is a poetic rumination on the way civilization and barbarism blend into each other, a perceptive subject to contemplate these days.

Cal State Northridge, Art Galleries, 18111 Nordoff St. to Jan. 30, (818) 885-2226, closed Sundays.

Clay Works: The California aesthetic has a long commitment to refining craft into art. Peter Voulkos did it for ceramics in the ‘50s.

With a start like that you’d think clay art would be thriving still. Instead, according to a show at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts, the form is in disturbed transition. It seems artists are having as much trouble dealing with the world’s changes as everybody else.

Titled “Transformed From Clay: 14 Southern California Artists,” the exhibition was organized by center director Jay Belloli. Not surprisingly, the sensibility of the ensemble grafts baroque vigor to wan amusing rococo intimacy that is further hybridized by multicultural inspiration.

Keiko Fukuzawa, for example, presents tea and dinner services combining Japanese refinement with California funk. The result is a species of whacked-out eccentricity expressed in encrusted coral surfaces, octopus-shaped teapots, cups of thimble proportions and Arp-like torsos writhing with repressed sexual energy.

Nancy Monk has a little installation room to herself called “A Tomb Discovered.” It’s full of faux naif ancient amulets with graffiti stick figures, plaques, toys and a row of tiny baby blue mummy cases labeled “Made in USA.” Monk’s point about boutique internationalism turning history into a bazaar for ephemera appealing to 9-year-old girls is pungent and funny. The work, alas, gets as tenuous as its satirical targets.

The show goes on trying to rectify cultural opposites. Yung Dong Nam struggles to bring archeology up to date. Juanita Jimenez’s “Hittite Series” Warholizes rows of ancient-style urns while Luis Bermudez attempts to streamline Mexican folk masks.

Western art has been absorbing the aesthetics of other cultures for a long time, but the mix is different now and it’s throwing things out of kilter. The work is not as technically sharp as that of its California ancestors although Patric Firper and David Wulfeck try to keep things on track.

Also on view is a risible conceptual piece by Ruth Honegger and Marino Pascal cumbersomely called “Beyond the Politics of Exclusion Toward an Art of Inclusion.” It presents photos and letters solicited from more that 100 Americans who ran for President in the recent election. Respondents included everyone from the guy who won to housewives, utopians, evangelists and one irritated chap who was registered by a friend as a practical joke. The work is as amusing and revealing as similar cultural sabotage by Jeffrey Vallance.

* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena to Dec. 23, (818) 792-5101, closed Mondays.