Trouble Creeps Into Paradise

Chiho Aoshima’s solo debut begins with “Paradise,” a poster-size digital print that depicts seven winsome teens lolling away a picture-perfect afternoon on a verdant island adrift in a dazzling aqua sky. Napping under trees, dipping toes in crystalline waters, petting a fawn, cuddling one another and fiddling with their hairstyles, the dark-haired nudes appear to be leading lives of absolute contentment, not a worry in the world to put a wrinkle on their pretty faces.

That, at least, is how it looks to a viewer standing in the foyer of Blum & Poe Gallery. To anyone who lives in the real world of adult responsibilities, such sugarcoated visions are dime-a-dozen daydreams.

But when you look closely, you notice that none of the girls seems to be happy. On the whole, they appear to be going through the motions, acting out someone else’s fantasies as if they were robots or clones with no will of their own. The notion that trouble’s brewing in paradise--and that there’s more to Aoshima’s girls than meets the eye--is driven home in the main gallery, where four similarly printed images paint a picture of teen life that’s anything but idyllic.

“Chinese Noodles Girl” shows the aftermath of a bicycle accident in an ancient graveyard, a bowl of ramen spilling over the head of a hapless delivery girl. She signals her distress by holding the back of her wrist to her forehead, like a heroine from a classic movie.

The visions that unfold in these works seem to belong to the teens they portray. In “Mushroom Room,” a nude girl lies on her bed and stares at the ceiling as an abundance of the polka-dotted fungus sprouts all around her. Whether poisonous or hallucinatory, their upright forms are distinctly phallic.

In “The Red-Eyed Tribe,” a nearly 12-foot-long panorama, the Tokyo-based artist presents a band of stylish goddesses who preside over a seaside Eden, where mountains descend from the heavens, fish swim through the sky and giant crystals hover overhead, like alien spacecraft. In Aoshima’s girl-world, nymphets ride centipedes, and Gila monsters as initiates mix magic potions and acolytes pick plump cherries from a tree’s serpentine limbs.

The newest print is also the most chilling. Blood flows freely in “The Birth of a Giant Zombie,” which features a lithe blond with an ax stuck in her head. Lilliputian mummies, cute vampires and ravishing skeletons populate this perverse land, which would be horrifying if not for Aoshima’s delicate touch. A pastel-tinted sunset and loads of spring blossoms transform the Gothic nightmare into a reverie at once lovely and melancholic.

Utterly artificial and stunningly seductive, her exquisitely rendered cartoons give vivid form to the topsy-turvy world in which we live, where repressed fantasies do a lot more damage than those that see the light of day. In the not-too-distant future, Aoshima will likely be thought of as a Realist.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through March 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A Touch of Classicism, Mixed With Romanticism

Unlike Classicism, Romanticism lives on today as the rebellious avant-garde desire to break away from historical precedents. At China Art Objects Galleries, Edgar Bryan’s solo debut consists of four terrific oils-on-canvas (and two more in the office upstairs) that combine Classicism’s desire to be inspired by another age with Romanticism’s fantasy of breaking free of such influences.

Above all, the young artist’s beautifully painted pictures are weird. Not a trace of Postmodern irony can be found in them. Nor can a whiff of mockery or sarcasm. Nevertheless, you’d be hard-pressed to say they’re sincere. Their pleasures are direct but hardly straightforward.

One nearly life-size image depicts a husky bearded guy who, wearing an apron and disposable plastic gloves, stands behind a table and cuts a hunk of red meat. Although everything in the painting screams “Butcher,” you can’t help but think that that’s not what it’s about. Bryan has done nothing to disguise the fact that he worked from a studio setup. The blank background and paucity of props suggest that he’s after something more elusive than a portrait of an old-fashioned tradesman.

A plate of fat sausages and an empty beer bottle star in the show’s largest painting. In its blurry background, a silhouetted woman raises her arms, as if practicing a dance. But the biggest mystery resides in the foreground, where it’s impossible to tell if the sausages are accompanied by chunks of potatoes or apples or Gouda cheese. Bryan is too talented a painter to leave such things to chance, so his unidentifiable food objects leave you wondering.

The remaining two paintings steal the show. In one, a homeless man plays pool with a dignified character who looks as if he’d be equally at home in an Italian fashion magazine or any 17th century Northern European painting of the rising bourgeoisie. The other portrays a red-eyed student who looks as if he hasn’t slept in a week. Clutching a sheet of paper on which is typed an absurd story about a purloined potato, the young man sits at a table, contemplating the spud.

If Bryan didn’t paint with such jaw-dropping facility and prickly verve, it might be possible to think of his works as precocious pranks, clever evocations of elements from Manet, Chardin, Caravaggio and Zurbaran, as well as from Gerhard Richter, John Curran and Kurt Kauper.

Although much is still unresolved in Bryan’s promising paintings, they are going somewhere you won’t want to miss.

China Art Objects Galleries, 933 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 613-0384, through March 9. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

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A Flight Plan That Strays Into Mundaneness

Soo Kim’s large color photographs pay a visit to the world of international travel, depicting flying jets, seated passengers and people waiting to meet them at the gate. Unfortunately, the young artist’s images bring very little that is original to the common experience of air travel. At Sandroni-Rey Gallery, Kim’s 11 C-prints fall into three groups. The first consists of five images of the undersides of planes as they approach or depart from LAX. Tightly cropped so that their noses, tails and wings form abstract compositions, these pictures emphasize the vulnerability of the aircraft, their plump bellies streaked by oil leaks and marred by everyday wear and tear.

Three images Kim shot from her seat on trips to London, Copenhagen and Seoul are more touching. Each shows the back of the seat immediately in front of hers, around the side of which appears another passenger’s shoulder or a few strands of hair. Whether taken on planes or transit buses, each captures the soft light that enters through the vehicle’s window and the ghostly reflections that appear there.

Each of the final three pieces depicts a person standing in a crowd at LAX’s international terminal, holding a sign like those limousine drivers use to locate the travelers they’ve been sent to pick up. But the people in Kim’s pictures do not work for car services. They are friends she has asked to pose with signs bearing the names of people they’d like to meet.

The man waiting for Raymond Carver looks as if he has given up but continues to stick around because he doesn’t know what else to do. The woman pretending she was sent to greet Yoko Ono appears to be at the point where frustration boils over into anger. And the guy looking for Chico Buarque brings a child’s eagerness to his task. Undaunted by its long odds, he seems to be inspired by the knowledge that stranger things have happened.

All of Kim’s handsomely printed photographs are accessible and more or less charming. But they fail to take viewers beyond the obvious, borrowing styles and formats from too many other artists. In a sense, Kim treats the phenomenon of international travel as if she were a tourist, merely scratching the surface of subjects that merit closer scrutiny and deeper, more insightful treatment.

Sandroni-Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through March 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Computer Tools Added to the Artist’s Palette

At Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery, an instructive exhibition presents works by eight artists who use advanced computer technology as if it were just another tool, like a paintbrush, pencil or chisel. Titled “GHz: The Post-Analog Object in L.A.,” the thought-provoking show features a wide variety of objects. (The title stands for gigahertz, a unit of frequency.) These include ceramic teapots, monochrome paintings, wooden benches, a sound installation, fiberglass sculptures, ink-jet prints and bracelets made of pearls, plastic and sapphires.

Co-curators Stephen Nowlin, the gallery director, and John O’Brien, an artist and writer, have selected pieces whose reliance on high-tech devices and up-to-the-minute software is not immediately evident. Unlike an earlier crop of artists, whose infatuation with newfangled technology often overwhelmed what they did with it, this group uses computers as a means to an end.

Their works represent the next phase in the integration of technology, design and creativity. How an artist made something is never as compelling as how it makes you respond, and the best works in “GHz” deliver on the latter while arousing curiosity about the former.

These include Patricia Moisan’s finely patterned paintings on undulating sheets of acrylic; Cindy Kolodziejski’s vessels with distorted images painted on their curved surfaces; George Stone’s 20-part sound system energized by solar cells; and Sue Dorman’s odd jewelry, which combines gold, silver, precious gems and Carborundum in asymmetrical settings.

Four Iris prints by Linda Nishio resemble extremely refined versions of drawings kids made in the 1960s with Spirograph kits. The sense of motion they capture is lost in her aluminum sculptures, which appear to be industrial-strength tops that have stopped spinning. Likewise, floor and wall works by Wendy Adest, David Schafer and Jason Pilarski are too static and antiseptic to repay the time spent with them.

Despite the diversity of the works, a sense of homogeneity pervades. Color plays a minor role, with a dull palette of whites, grays and silvers predominating. Likewise, the largest objects (by Nishio, Adest, Schafer and Pilarski) are so sleek, polished and clinical that they do not elicit the desire to touch them--or even to imagine what that might feel like. Although computers are changing the way art is made, they have a long way to go to catch up with many of its simpler, tried-and-true tools.

Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (626) 396-2244, through April 21. Closed Mondays.