When East Collides With West

As if making up for decades of Anglocentrism, Orange County suddenly is awash in art exhibitions dealing with the work of particular ethnicities.

Most recently, “Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Contemporary Latino Art” (which closed last weekend) at the Fullerton Art Center and now “Memories of Overdevelopment: The Philippine Diaspora in Contemporary Art” (at the UC Irvine Art Gallery through April 13), “Who’s Afraid of Freedom: Korean-American Artists in California” (Newport Harbor Art Museum, through May 26) and “The Virgin, Frida and Me: Contemporary Chicana Artists” (Saddleback College Art Gallery, through April 24).

The UCI and Newport Harbor exhibitions have a certain commonality, so it seems appropriate to look at them together.

One of the five co-curators of “Memories of Overdevelopment,” Yong Soon Min, is one of the 17 artists in the Korean American exhibition. Both shows deal in some way with the collision of Asian and Western cultural values, and both are samplers of diverse media.

Korean Americans obviously have experienced the United States firsthand, while 1996 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of nearly a half-century of U.S. domination of the Philippines. Filipinos today have grown up in a culture in which both English and Tagalog are official languages. (Another layer of pan-cultural conditioning derives from three centuries of Spanish rule before the U.S. takeover.)

Yet the two shows are markedly different in their stylistic inclusiveness. “Who’s Afraid of Freedom”--titled after one of the paintings selected by curator Sarah Lee--contains conservative modernist work, some of it on a bloated scale, as well as a few mild and often didactic excursions into more contemporary modes. “Memories of Overdevelopment” is dominated by more outspoken pieces.

After viewing the work in “Who’s Afraid of Freedom,” it’s hard not to wonder whether Korean American artists share an innate conservatism (a notion surely disproved by video pioneer Nam June Paik) or whether the selections simply mirror curator Lee’s personal taste.

Perhaps the answer lies in the catalog essay, in which Lee says she chose works specifically dealing with themes of “cultural identity, assimilation, inclusion and the various reconciliations between Eastern and Western heritages.”

This approach contrasts with the more combative theme of the Philippine diaspora show, which, according to a brief posted essay, “is not a tribute to immigrant assimilation into a more powerful culture but one map of a process of ongoing exchange, of migration and return, of dislocation and resistance.”

In any case, except for Sasha Yungju Lee’s brash and politically charged satires on the ethnocentrism of glossy magazines, the more memorable work in the show tends to be small or quiet.

Hyunsook Cho’s row of markers with rounded tops (“Five Columns”) has a meditative, even elegiac appeal. The use of paper pulp to imitate stone in itself mirrors the dichotomies between the living and the dead, transitoriness and permanence; even the act of imitation recalls the vanity of humankind.

Untitled mixed-media paintings by So Moon Kim are psychological emblems evoking the deracinated experience of the emigre dealing with differences in language, home and the demarcation of traditional female occupations.

In one of Kim’s works, a page of secretarial want ads from a Korean newspaper, cut into the shape of a Western house and superimposed on a painting of traditional Korean dwellings, contains images of a floating figure, a masked woman and--quite startlingly--a group of almond-shaped eyes resembling a school of fish.

Of Min’s own pieces in the show, the smaller, casual-looking one she made this year (“Mother Load”) has a much greater resonance than the massive formal installation (“DMZ XING”) from 1994, which bogs down in an overabundance of hard-to-read text and a heavily programmatic design.

“Mother Load” consists of piles and bundles of clothing, sorted as if they were laundry. These items include a formally folded kimono made from camouflage cloth and a pile of scissored pieces of women’s underwear and men’s street clothing.

The piece allusively introduces intertwining issues involving women, including the impact of war on traditional patterns of life at home, sweatshop labor in the United States and the so-called “comfort women” of World War II--Koreans, Filipinas and women of other Asian nationalities forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese army.

The latter theme also is a subject of one of Sasha Yungju Lee’s mock magazine covers. She remakes an issue of Playboy with a photo of herself in a black strapless dress (“Yung Ju Bears All”), wryly proposing the historical sex scandal as a consumer lure.

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Of the 20 Filipino artists in the “Diaspora” exhibition, 13 live outside their native land. Having grown up in a multilayered culture, they became part of emigre communities that are even more culturally hybridized.

The U.S. connection is naturally the strongest in this show, whose other co-curators are gallery curator Pamela Bailey and UCI graduate students Vicente Golveo and Cirilo Domine.

In a series of digitally manipulated photographs, Joseph Santarromana merges his own face with each of several U.S. pop-culture figures: Ronald McDonald, Mickey Mouse and Homer Simpson. He also slips into the skin of former Philippine dictatorial president Ferdinand Marcos. Each hybrid portrait is a frankly fake creation, belying the hoary notion of a melting pot while reinforcing the indivisible blend of cultural influences--good, bad or indifferent--in a single life.

Assimilation and resistance to it are intertwined with issues of sex, religion and the lowly status of the emigre worker in a good many of the works in this show.

Manuel Ocampo, surely the best-known young Filipino artist, lives up to his mordant reputation in the painting, “Friede Auf Erden” (Peace on Earth). The image of giant cannibalistic rats foggily snorting and shooting cocaine that’s heaped on a can of tuna is a grotesque parody of the dislocation between papal preaching and the desperation of life in the underclass.

But a few of the pieces in the show resist being put in a thematic box. Maryrose Mendoza’s “Donut Spinal Cord” (a towering, bowed-out pile of doughnuts) and Rene Marquez’s “Aftermath of Betsy” series (enigmatic sketches on stained paper towels) seem open to interpretations that wander far afield.

The serious omission in “Memories of Overdevelopment” is the lack of any analysis of the art and larger issues of Filipino contemporary culture. One reason, Min explained last week, was the lack of money to produce a catalog documenting the gallery’s March 8 symposium on themes of the exhibition.

What a pathetic commentary on this era of de-funding, when the lack of a few thousand dollars prevents a university exhibition on a timely cultural theme from having appropriate scholarly materials.

* “Memories of Overdevelopment: The Philippine Diaspora in Contemporary Art,” through April 13, UC Irvine Art Gallery, UCI campus (off Bridge Road). Free. Hours: Noon-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday. (714) 824-6610.

* “Who’s Afraid of Freedom: Korean-American Artists in California,” through May 26, Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. $4 adults, $2 students and senior citizens, free for children under 12 and for all on Tuesdays. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; noon-5 p.m Sundays. (714) 759-1122.