Margaret Honda: Giving the Gift of Insight : Art: She tells a Newport Harbor museum audience that the aim of her works is to explore the frequent chasm between perception and reality.

Conceptual artist Margaret Honda’s favorite adage might be You Can’t Always Trust What You See. With some of her work, it’s safest to heed that warning.

Her installation “Gift,” shown at Santa Monica’s Shoshana Wayne Gallery late last year for instance, consists of identical, unlabeled brown glass bottles, each filled with a white powdery substance and displayed so that viewers could sample them. Half the bottles contain powdered sugar; the other half contain boric acid, commonly used as roach poison.

“League,” another recent piece installed at the same gallery in late 1992, looks harmless, even alluring, from afar. But up close, its myriad, silvery elements, suspended from the ceiling low enough for viewers to bump into, clearly were large fishhooks.

“Some people were so terrified that they couldn’t move” through the installation alone and had to be helped out, Honda said Tuesday.

She discussed her recent work at a noon talk at Newport Harbor Art Museum. She is among 18 emerging regional artists in the museum’s fourth biennial show, titled “Southern California 1993.”

It’s not that she has aims to terrorize or poison anyone. No viewers actually tasted either the sugar or boric acid in “Gift,” Honda said. (A Shoshana Wayne Gallery owner said she had no fear of anyone sampling the powders because gallery visitors know never to touch artworks, and even if they did, the foul-tasting boric acid is harmful to humans only if ingested in large quantities).

The San Diego artist’s aim, she said, is to explore the frequent chasm between perception and reality, and between expectation and experience.

“I’m interested in how you know what it is you’re looking at and what resources you bring to figuring out what you’re looking at,” Honda said. “ ‘League,’ ” she said, was “about perceived danger and real danger, and it deals with your expectations (about) what’s going to happen and what’s not going to happen.”

“Gift” addresses the limitation of visual perception, Honda continued. In other words, even though viewers may see the bottles of sugar and boric acid, they can’t know for certain what it is they’re looking at unless they utilize another sense, that of taste.

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Within the installation, Honda conceals some of the bottles in finely crafted wood boxes with frosted glass lids. The lids slide off to clearly reveal the bottles, “but even though you can see the bottles, you’re not exactly sure what you’re looking at,” she said. “You can’t necessarily tell things apart visually, but you can in other ways.”

Honda’s contribution to the museum’s biennial is two 1993 pieces that each consist of a single, small dark red wood box. They too deal with the gap between perception and reality, but, she said, in terms of “seduction and betrayal.”

As a Sansei (a U.S. or Canadian citizen whose grandparents emigrated from Japan), Honda named one work “Urashima Taro,” the title of an ancient Japanese fable similar to the Greek myth of Pandora, after which she titled her second work.

Both fables, she writes in the exhibit catalogue, are stories in which “a gift is proffered, only to the ruination of the recipient.”

The moral of each story, she said, is that there was “a price to pay” for seeing things in a new, different way. That is a worthwhile risk, she suggested.

The work Honda is probably best known for is an earlier series, first shown in Long Beach in the late 1980s, of animal traps devised of wood, wire and other materials. This work also explores seduction and betrayal in that unsuspecting animals are seduced or lured in some way, only to be injured or killed.

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One is modeled after a 19th-Century wolf trap, consisting of a sharp knife piece embedded in a chunk of animal fat. It was designed, she said, so that when one wolf licked the fat, it would cut its tongue. Then, the scent of animal fat mixed with blood would draw other wolves, but, unable to find a carcass, they would become “enraged,” she said, “and supposedly devour each other.”

While she said that all “traps are all cruel,” her attempt was not to communicate whether she thought a trap was used to “good” purpose--such as gathering food--or to “bad”--mere destruction, as in the case of the wolf trap.

“I left the whole moral issue ambiguous in this show,” she said.

Honda also sought to employ ambiguity in “Sift,” an installation included in a 1992 Long Beach group show of art by 10 Sansei artists about their parents or grandparents who, like Honda’s parents, were interned at relocation camps during World War II.

“Sift” consisted of three large metal sieves, one as big as four feet in diameter, which represented the way in which internees were “sifted out of the population” into the camps, Honda said, and forbidden from speaking Japanese in an effort to “filter out their sense of community.”

Honda attempted, however, to avoid endowing the work with a single interpretation, hoping to reflect the ambiguity she felt while researching it: The secondhand accounts she read weren’t written by her parents, but by others, thus the facts of her family’s involvement “seemed very nebulous.”

“I try to present things that can (elicit) a wide range of responses,” Honda said. “This piece doesn’t necessarily look like it deals with internment.”

It did, however, to at least one audience member, Newport Beach financial adviser Gerald P. Sakura.

“I was interned” during World War II, Sakura said during a question-answer period. “I get the point here.”

* “Fourth Newport Biennial: Southern California 1993,” runs through Jan. 30 at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. $2 to $4. (714) 759-1122.