Chinese Connection

Although the work of painter Sinan Leong Revell and mixed-media artist Gay Wellington is divergent, the artists share common ground, making their two-person show at the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks a complementary experience. Both allude to Chinese themes and imagery and draw on the sub-theme of art as a window into personal interests.

For the Chinese American Revell, art is a way of delving into her own ancestry, considering the tragic and nostalgic aspects of life in the old country. “Sino-File” is a punning title for a show of fairly serious exploration of real and imagined scenes and mementos from her extended homeland.

Images are often glimpsed through layers of paint and collage-like designs, an extension of the artist trying to rediscover roots. Religious icons, Siddhartha and Buddha, blend with murky pictures of Revell’s ancestors from pre-Communist China.

Red Chinese repression and exploitation are drawn in clear yet non-explicit terms, as in “3 Women,” with its depiction of women shackled at the neck, painted in a ragged, Expressionist style. Still harsher is “Right to Die,” with a cramped, bloodied prisoner in a cage.

In all, the exhibit plays out like an expressive work-in-progress. Its imagery amounts to an unsettled but genuine investigation into the artist’s sense of self, colored by what she knows of familial and cultural history.

Wellington’s half of the gallery, in a show titled “Yesterdays,” is a decidedly happier place to visit. Her collages are filled with vaguely nostalgic ideas lightly spiced with philosophical pleasantries.

The delicately written text on one piece reads, “What lies before us, what lies behind us are tiny matters, compared with what lies within us.”

“One inch of time is worth a foot of jade,” reads another.

Similar quasi-Confucian sayings abound amid the gentle wash of visual materials, which speak in an ambiguous hush. Family photographs have been cut and pasted against the warm, brown backdrop of sheer paper and corrugated cardboard, textures that add to the overall haze of the work.

“Chinese Landscape” is a small work, dense with hand-applied images and photographs. Woven into this work is a sense, left unexplained, of places the artist has been to or that have filtered through the imperfect, reconstructive machinery of memory.

BE THERE

Sinan Leong Revell, “Sino-File,” and Gay Wellington, “Yesterdays,” through Aug. 28 at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. (818) 789-6012.