Exhibition Explores Tense Link Between the Past and Present

If contemporary art did not have issues with the tradition from which it sprang, it wouldn’t be contemporary--it would be traditional.

Central to contemporary art’s identity is its unresolved, often antagonistic relationship to the past. Never a matter of outright rejection, this rebellious stance toward history causes recent works that are truly of the moment to bristle with edgy energy.

This puts many viewers off--or at least rubs them the wrong way. With contemporary art, however, anxiety and satisfaction have to go hand in hand. Without the latter, the former falls flat, its resonance and pleasure reduced to hollow sentimentality.

At the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, an endearingly amateurish exhibition of 46 paintings, drawings and collages by Joan Jue Yen outlines a similar dialogue between the past and the present. A third-generation Chinese American who lives in Phoenix, Yen combines various media to draw, in extremely general terms, on her ancient Chinese heritage and her modern American life.

Holding together everything in “The Journey: Passages of a Chinese American--The Mixed Media Works of Joan Jue Yen” is the desire to resolve conflicts, between abstraction and representation, the past and the present, one culture and another. Paradoxically, the most engaging pieces are those in which things fall apart.

The largest of her five series includes 10 small acrylic paintings based on ancient and modern poems about longing, loss and loneliness. On their own, these works are unremarkable: atmospheric landscapes and placid abstractions, both laid out with an eye for harmonious arrangements and palatable color combinations. Each, however, is accompanied by a wall label on which is printed a poem from the 8th century to the present, by such Chinese masters as Meng Jiao, Li Bai, Ma Zhiyuan and Wang Wei. Like book illustrations, Yen’s paintings function as mood-setting backdrops for the short poems, many of which are extraordinary in their marriage of unsentimental precision and heartbreaking emotional power.

Hung between the paintings are nine rice paper collages on which the artist has glued various good-luck charms and written, in calligraphic script, Chinese proverbs. The casual, offhand appearance of the collages matches the blunt pragmatism expressed by the proverbs (whose English translations are printed on wall labels).

More important, Yen’s collages and paintings complement one another. Their pairing forms “The Immigrant Series,” which efficiently shifts back and forth between impersonal advice about making one’s way in the world and the intimate stirrings of troubled hearts.

The remaining series lack such multilayered appeal. In general, as Yen’s images grow in size they diminish in impact.

Visually, her “Fortune Cookie Series” is the boldest, its nine mixed-media collages putting the snappy graphics of Pop art to good use. Here, humor outdistances seriousness, with works such as “Blue Plate Special,” “Happy Feet” and “Vanity Mandala” addressing the subject of cross-cultural interaction more effectively than “The Angel of Angel Island” and “Freedom Flag,” both of which tend toward the portentous.

A similar problem plagues “The Coins,” “Silent Sounds” and “The Four Virtues: My Children” series, whose somber, philosophical themes are not matched by Yen’s skills as a painter. Dominated by blandly abstracted landscapes in which a few geometric elements float, these acrylics on canvas recycle styles of modern painting by smoothing over their rough edges.

In Yen’s hands, the visual turbulence intrinsic to the cut-and-paste fragments of collage becomes a decorative device that homogenizes compositions. Likewise, Surrealism’s once-shocking juxtapositions are transformed into mannered formalities, replacing a disquieting dynamic of attraction and repulsion with pleasant visual rhythms.

Part of the problem is that Yen imbues modern art with too much authority for its own good. The doubt and ambivalence that give it its edge are nowhere to be found in her overly respectful renditions of its forms. At the same time, her works do not embrace ancient traditions with sufficient discipline to be interesting in terms of technique or craftsmanship.

Although reconciling differences is an essential aspect of modern life--and an admirable strategy for getting through the day--it saps the vitality of contemporary art, dulling its capacity to throw subtle differences into anxious focus.

* “The Journey: Passages of a Chinese American--Mixed Media Works by Joan Jue Yen,” Pacific Asia Museum, 46 N. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena, (626) 449-2742, through Jan. 7. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Adults, $5.