Otherworldly Delicacy, Grace Mark Chu’s Works

For her L.A. solo debut, New York-based sculptor Anne Chu shows nine delicate watercolor studies and a dozen 2-foot-tall figures whose crudely carved faces, limbs and garments cannot hide the gracefulness they embody.

Based on ceramic funerary sculptures from the Tang dynasty, Chu’s honest copies at Marc Foxx Gallery include diminutive musicians, stately officials, elegant ladies and ferocious warriors (all roughly cut from common chunks of wood) and a pair of stocky horses (handsomely cast in bronze). As a group, these regal and heavenly stand-ins combine otherworldly calm with contemporary restlessness.

Each of Chu’s figures has been painted with haphazard splotches of translucent casein, a milk-based mixture of pigments that dries to form a powdery patina. The angelic face and serpentine contours of “Court Lady With Pigtails” are covered with patches of mossy green and faded peach, through which the wood grain is visible. Various ochers, aquas and rusty reds coat “Performer With Bird,” and a rainbow of sorbet-tinted colors gives “Lady on Horseback” a dreamy presence that contrasts dramatically with her earth-toned mount.

Chu uses dental drills to make her surfaces look as if they’ve been caressed into existence. Initially, it’s hard to tell if you’re looking at figures made of papier-ma^che, plaster or strangely glazed ceramic. When you finally identify the material, it’s still hard to believe it’s wood.

Extremely light on their feet, these nonchalant works seem to barely touch down in the material world. Like Chu’s fluid watercolors, they flaunt her talents by hiding them in animated figures whose awkwardness is always buoyed by the presence of seeming ease.

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* Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., 213-857-5571, through June 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.