Past, Present and P.C. : May Sun’s art was politically correct before it was fashionable and a lot of it is out there for the world to see

Col. Sanders, Mao Tse-tung, Sun Yat-Sen and early film star Anna May Wong may not seem to have much to do with one another, but artist May Sun makes their paths cross. They’re just a few of the figures who float through her collages, assemblages, installations, sculptures, performance and public artworks. Yet, unusual as her cast of characters may be, it’s no more varied than her career.

The Shanghai-born and Hong Kong-bred Sun has enjoyed a marked rise in prominence both locally and nationally in the past few years. Hailed for her work in a variety of media, she has more recently received a number of public art commissions.

Yet for all Sun’s flitting back and forth between media and professional contexts, there’s continuity to her work. The medium may change, but the message--exploring the hidden histories of Chinese-American immigrants and others--remains the same.

“She’s able to create a magic environment that places viewers in a cultural sacred space, giving figures from the past power as ghost memories,” says Anne Ayres, co-curator with Marilu Knode of the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s 1991 Third Newport Biennial, which included an installation by Sun. “May has a visual and formal acumen that brings power to what might otherwise be just documentary work. That visual sense has to do with her intuitive connection of the visual and the mythic and how they key to cultural history.”

And that is a message currently much in demand. Recently, Sun has completed or begun work on installations in Chinatown, the Culver City Hall and the Hollywood/Western Metro Rail Station. Last month, Sun was among the artists commissioned to create work at Los Angeles’ Union Station Gateway Center. (She also has a show up at Robert Berman Gallery through Jan. 10.)

Sun did not, however, tailor her work to fit the trendy desires of those who hand out the commissions. On the contrary, Sun’s field of interest and way of working was on track long before cultural specificity became hip and the art world climbed on the P.C. bandwagon.

“Before I started doing public art, I used a site-specific research process in my own works, such as (the 1988 installation) ‘L.A./River/China/Town,’ ” she says, seated in the office-studio of the Hollywood home she shares with her husband and sometime-collaborator, theater director Guy Giarrizzo. “Now it seems that working with the community and finding out the histories of the site is also the bent that public art is going toward.”

Yet, Sun is discovering that public art has its own sand traps, especially for an artist with a substantial body of solo work under her belt. “Dealing with people can drive you up the wall,” she concedes. “You have to learn to be diplomatic because you have to work with all these committees and the community, and it’s more like (an evolution). With public art, you don’t have total artistic freedom.”

Sun’s grandfather fought for Sun Yat-Sen and her mother’s two older sisters marched alongside Mao. One of these aunts, Gong Peng, whose life was dramatized in Sun’s 1990 performance “The Chinese Chess Piece,” became Chou En Lai’s translator and China’s assistant foreign minister.

These strategically placed relatives notwithstanding, Sun’s parents took their vacation visas and fled to Hong Kong when the artist was only 2. They immigrated to the United States 14 years later, just a few years after the Cultural Revolution rocked China.

Sun received her bachelor’s degree in fine art from UCLA in 1976, before going on to graduate studies at the Otis Art Institute. In 1985, her professional career well under way, Sun returned to China for the first time since her childhood.

Call it a turning point. That trip, with its images of Shanghai and Beijing and her family’s past, provided the raw material for Sun’s 1986 performance artwork “The Great Wall or How Red Is My China?,” co-written with Jack Slater, with music by Tom Recchion. Giarrizzo staged it at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Powerhouse and the Cast Theater.

An inquiring glimpse back at Chinese history and rebellion from Sun’s dual cultural vantage, it was her way of calling up spiritual ancestors to hear what they might have to say to today’s Chinese-Americans.

Sun’s visual works also interweave personal and civic experience, with an emphasis on Chinese and Chinese-American histories. As with her performances, the tone is frequently ironic and dissembling, yet ultimately serious. Sun presents images from immigrant life in order to suggest that we remember and reconsider how Los Angeles came to be. Bridges and water are recurring themes. The Culver City city hall project, for example, is a permanent installation focusing on the Gabrieleno Indians, who lived near La Ballona Creek until the 18th Century.

Sun’s 1988 installation “L.A./River/China/Town” was one of the most memorable pieces of its type in recent local memory. It was also a career breakthrough.

Presented as part of the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s “Art in the Raw” debut exhibition series, the environmental work was a collaboration between Sun, Recchion and stage director Peter Brosius. It dramatized the plight of L.A.’s original Chinatown--which was located on what is now Olvera Street--during the latter half of the 19th Century.

In and around four pitched white tents like the ones used to house Chinese immigrant railroad workers along the Los Angeles River in the 1870s, Sun created a series of tableaux that recalled the 1849 flood that sent so many Chinese from their homeland to L.A.; Homer Lea, the Caucasian Santa Monica man who trained troops for the Chinese revolution; the 1871 Chinatown massacre in which 19 men were killed; an L.A. River nightmare allegory and more.

Viewers entered each of the tents via a wooden bridge, arriving in a sand-filled central courtyard overhung with a sculpture of Chinese gongs. Inside, objects such as upturned shovels, a hanging dead duck bathed in red light and sand dunes conjured up a painful--and largely unknown--part of L.A.’s past.

Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic wrote: “This art has a light touch and a tough center; it’s as if the artist strokes you with a feather while socking you in the stomach. So effective is the ambience that the cataclysmic events documented by ‘L.A./River/China/Town’ tend to sink in slowly.”

Others were also impressed. “That show blew my socks off,” says Robert Berman, who put together a Sun exhibition at his B-1 Gallery shortly thereafter. “I’m attracted to site-specific installation work, although it’s difficult to deal with as an art dealer, to shrink it down to objects that become sellable. I have the most respect for artists who can take a raw space and make a statement that changes you totally.”

The current Berman Gallery show, however, is not an installation. “I felt like doing more intimate objects right now,” says Sun of the wooden light boxes whose trays hold such familiar symbols of hers as sand and signs of the I Ching. “Part of it is about change in government.”

Sun affords installation a preferred status in her repertory. “My real passion has always been working with space and environment,” she says. “I was a sculpture major in college, but I never did traditional sculpture, it’s always been environmental or installation.”

Other notable Sun installations include “Who’s Right? What’s Left?”--a 1990 work for the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. In that outing, the artists utilized what she knew would be some particularly loaded imagery, given the volatile local feelings about Cuba and communism.

Dominating the two main walls of the exhibition were out-sized portraits of Fidel Castro and Chairman Mao--the two holdouts in the post-Cold War era. The text on the walls included questions about the nature of ideologies: “Is Capitalism a euphemism for Consumerism? Is Capitalism the lesser of two evils?” The floor was covered with sand from a local beach and copper piping in the shape of the I Ching symbol for revolution.

In 1991, Sun was included in the Newport Biennial with a work that again probed the lost worlds of California’s vanished Chinatowns. “I felt (her installation) was giving me information I didn’t have,” says curator Ayres, “and that wasn’t easy to come by about particular ways of seeing and being in the world--what it’s like to be a member of the Chinese-American community and have that dual cultural identity.”

That same year, she created an installation about Sun Yat-Sen for San Francisco’s Capp Street Project. “I was interested in the Chinese-Americans who secretly helped him to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty,” she says. “It was also about one of my favorite themes: the crossing of Western and Eastern political ideals.

“Sun Yat-Sen was a traveling revolutionary with bases all over the world, but mainly I was interested in the contribution of the Chinese-American community in the United States,” Sun continues. “They would all give him their banquet halls to lecture in, but because it was all so secret, no one really talked about it and passed it down. All these people had a part in the revolution across the ocean.”

As she gave these collaborators back their place in history, Sun has also often sought to retrieve the pasts of Chinese women, most notably in her 1990 performance “The Chinese Chess Piece.” Commissioned by the Los Angeles Festival and directed by Giarrizzo, the work was staged on a giant chessboard set in the Hollywood Methodist Church gym and featured five main characters: communist Gong Peng, actress Anna May Wong (at both young and older ages), aviator Katherine Cheung and a narrator simply called A Dreamer.

“Banality takes over,” wrote Robert Koehler in The Times. “If ever the term stick figures applied to characters, ‘The Chinese Chess Piece’ is an unfortunate model.”

The experience didn’t leave Sun rushing back to the boards. “I haven’t done any performance since the L.A. Festival,” she says. “It’s just so draining. When I was doing performance in the early ‘80s, I was working as a graphic designer at the Mark Taper (Forum), so I had a regular income. It’s a survival issue. How do you make a living as a performance artist?”

Not only has Sun had better luck lately with public art, she also finds it a welcome difference from performance art’s highly personal tone. “Being a performance artist is being yourself out there,” she says. “So when I do public art, it’s about something that is not personal. I like to go between media.”

She has, in fact, gone into public art with something of a vengeance. “The permanence is part of it, but so is the process,” says Sun of public art’s appeal. “I like the research, finding stories and uncovering people. Once public art is done, it’s not something that only people who go to galleries or museums can experience.”

The downside is the too-many-cooks-spoil-the-soup syndrome. “It’s more like being a designer, only you have millions of clients and you have to present your concept and fight over it,” says Sun. “But the performance artist in me does enjoy the process as a sort of live theater.”

A case in point was Sun’s nearly complete Chinatown gate on Adobe Street, an 8-foot-by-15-foot structure composed of rusty shovels and pitchforks reminiscent of the ones used by immigrant laborers.

The artist originally proposed four panels with four photographs as part of the work. However, when she wanted to include Katherine Cheung, the first Chinese-American women to get a pilot’s license and now an 87-year-old resident of the area, the Chinatown advisory committee balked. “The committee had a problem with that because the three other photographs were from a much earlier period and they were all pretty anonymous,” says Sun. “They thought Cheung stuck out too much, so I listened on that one.”

Sun spent several months in the architectural firm Escudero-Fribourg, working with Paul Diez on her plans for the Hollywood/ Western Metro Rail station. The design includes photo panels that show workers of various ethnicities, both those who built the 1800s’ railroads and the ones at work on today’s subway system. Inlaid floor tiles incorporate symbols that suggest a variety of cultures.

Architect Diez is also one of Sun’s collaborators, along with artist Richard Wyatt, on the largest project commissioned for the Union Station Gateway Center. The team is designing the entrance landmark, a pedestrian bridge that will overlook the Hollywood Freeway. At the bridge’s base is a tiled courtyard featuring an array of faces of different ethnicities. Stairs lead up to the bridge walkway, where there’s an aquarium filled with fish once indigenous to the L.A. River.

Times art critic Christopher Knight took both the selection of artists and their plans to task. “As the selection process came up with mediocrity . . . you begin to wonder if, unconsciously, blandness was desired,” he wrote. “For in the occasionally volatile world of public art, some insurance against potential controversy might come from hiring artists who are already laboring in nearby fields.

“The one thread of continuity among the winning designs is a trite conception of public art as some sort of rudimentary, three-dimensional history book. . . . Gateway Plaza’s art is ‘Dick, Jane and Sally Discover Themselves Through Mass Transit.’ ”

Sun, however, sees Knight’s attack as part of what she calls a “backlash against multiculturalism.”

“The trouble is that everything gets pigeonholed and trivialized,” she says. “As soon as artists other than white artists start to be included, (critics) scream bloody murder.

“The impetus behind our project was to talk about the settlers who came up from Mexico who were from diverse racial backgrounds: 26 of them had African ancestry,” says Sun. “We wanted to do something that was spiritually uplifting. That may sound corny to the post-Modernist crowd, but that’s where our hearts are.”

Still, Sun acknowledges that there’s a problem of misperception. While nonwhite artists may be unfairly expected to make work that deals with issues of culture and ethnicity, if that in fact is where the artist’s true interests lie, her motives are likely to be misunderstood.

“What we’re trying to achieve is not being judged because you’re a member of an ethnic minority,” says Sun. “At first multiculturalism was a good thing, but now it seems to have gotten off track.”