Chinese works, familiar ground

Though common enough in today’s increasingly global art market, a nationality-oriented group show like “China Avant Garde” at Arena 1 is a tricky thing to approach. China, to state the obvious, is a vast and complicated country. Without a familial connection or a specialized degree -- and probably even with those things -- most American viewers are doomed to an at best partial appreciation of this work’s historical, political and philosophical context, particularly absent a catalog or any contextualizing information.

These artists, moreover-- 12 in all -- are largely unfamiliar. Their bios are sprinkled with international venues, but most have shown primarily in their own country. From the two or three pieces each contributes to the exhibition, it’s difficult to get a general feeling for their work and impossible to gauge their relationship to the whole of contemporary Chinese art.

The curious thing, given the cultural distance and consequent potential for misreading, is that the work should look so disappointingly familiar. It is typical of what seems to have become a reigning international style, characterized by a stable range of Postmodern formal strategies -- photography, figurative painting, collage and performance, often involving appropriation, socio-political commentary and humor -- and some identifiable inflection of cultural specificity.

The show has its share of individually strong works, but, limited to this familiar paradigm, the overall effect is unremarkable. One leaves longing for more, whether breadth (a museum-scale show, perhaps, with twice the number of artists and an essay-heavy catalog) or depth (a more extensive sampling of the strongest four or five artists).

The principal theme uniting the work is an emphasis on the individual face and figure -- a reaction, the exhibition points out, to China’s communist history. The most singularly potent expression of the theme comes in a poster-sized photograph by Sheng Qi depicting the palm of the artist’s hand, which is missing one finger, positioned against a field of vivid red and cradling a small, square photograph of a young boy. It’s a simple work, visually and conceptually, but deeply poignant.

Paintings by Zhao Nengzhi and Guo Wei explore the expressive potential of the human face, portraying anonymous individuals suspended in moments of animated emotion. Who these figures are, and what exactly they’re feeling, is unclear and secondary to the sensual lyricism of the image.

Huang Yan explores a far more familiar face in his perversely charming busts of Mao Tse-tung, which are made from white porcelain and hand-painted with traditional blue floral patterns. Equally lovely, if also tongue-in-cheek, is a painting by the same artist in which a very narrow strip of landscape, rendered in a traditional style, extends scroll-like across a flat, monochromatic ground.

The most visually dazzling works in the show are those of Lin Tianmiao, in which multiple images of a gorgeous female figure clad in stylishly surreal costumes are superimposed across desolate, sepia-toned landscape photographs.

The most prominent works, in terms of scale and quantity, and probably the most memorable are several wall-sized photographs and one video by the Gao Brothers. They document an ongoing series of “hugging performances,” which consist of just what you’d think: groups of people, some naked, standing in various locales, hugging.

The images are a little clumsy -- irregularly focused, slightly shaky -- but in a way that comes to seem endearing, particularly in contrast to slick Westerners of the performance-photography ilk, such as Vanessa Beecroft and Gregory Crewdson. There’s an appealingly mysterious quality -- who are these people, we wonder, and what are they doing? -- but the message is as straightforward as you please and refreshingly without irony. It’s simply a call for contact -- just what the best of the work in a show like this provides.

Arena 1, 3026 Airport Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 397-7456, through June 18. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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A grand struggle of opposing forces

London-based artist Katie Pratt begins each painting with an accident: a splash, a smear, a spray -- a staged but random collision of paint and canvas, the violence of which she makes no effort to soften or aestheticize.

One large canvas in her terrific show at Kontainer Gallery is dominated by half a dozen sagging, rubbery blotches, the color and texture of old latex. Another looks as if it were pummeled with a clump of wet tar. (The material is actually oil paint throughout.)

Preserved on the canvas like the remains of a performance, they’re rough and spontaneous gestures that infuse the work with an unsettling sense of chaos.

Pratt surrounds these incidents with a dizzying quantity of intricate, embroidery-like detail. Veiling the rubbery blotches, for instance, are several hundred tiny, gray daubs resembling flower blossoms. Shooting out from the tar-like smear is a dense net of thin red and green dotted lines. The patterns are clearly improvisational, spun out from those original accidents, but they temper the chaos and lend the compositions a peculiar sense of order.

The result is a compositional tension that makes every canvas feel like an adventure: a grand struggle of opposing forces. The accidental forms are heavy, clumsy, brawny, tactile and immobile; the patterns light, quick, agile and responsive.

The works range from about 10-by-12 inches to roughly 7 feet square, and Pratt scarcely misses a step throughout. Each canvas is utterly unique -- there are a few repeated motifs but no crutches or redundancies -- and each expresses this precarious balance as a fresh, dynamic interaction.

Kontainer Gallery, 6130 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 933-4746, through May 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Formica never looked so intimate

The world of Uta Barth is a cool, still, contemplative place, devoid of human inhabitants and preternaturally quiet. She photographs the interiors of rooms, as well as rural and suburban landscapes, but her primary subject is the space -- or more precisely the air -- these environments contain. In past work, she’s approached it almost as a character in its own right, focusing her lens on an empty point somewhere midground, reducing all other visible objects to a blur.

In recent years, these objects have entered again -- treetops, telephone poles, windowsills -- but the air remains charged. It’s an eloquent, almost magical presence diffused throughout each image.

In a new series at ACME, Barth narrows her scope considerably, zeroing in on a short stretch of her own desk: a pristine, cream-colored Formica surface backed by a white windowsill and a glowing white curtain. Each set of photographs (some are single, some diptychs or triptychs) approaches this space from a slightly different angle, skewing the desk’s L-shaped seam in a subtly different direction, and each contains a single, informal flower arrangement. The light throughout is soft and white, almost beatific -- except in a handful of instances in which she pairs an image with its negative, printed in a startling blood red.

It is a sweet, simple, touchingly intimate body of work. The space is so small and the components so few that every detail -- the variety of the flowers, the shape of the vase or jar, the arrangement of stems within the vase, a scattering of petals around it -- takes on a precious significance. The effect, as with much of her work, is an exquisite sharpening of the senses.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Spaces 1 & 2, Los Angeles, (323) 857-5942, through May 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The joys of going beyond kitsch

Digital art is often touted as a sort of promised land: a limitless realm where the laws of matter recede and just about anything you can possibly imagine doing to an image can be done in the blink of an eye, without paint spills or paper cuts. In practice, at least on the two-dimension level, it’s more often than not flat, lackluster and dull.

However sophisticated the equipment, there seems always to be something missing from a digital print: richness, depth, warmth -- some element of humanity. In her recent work at Patricia Correia Gallery, Patti Heid has found an ingenious way around the problem, with good, old-fashioned couture handiwork.

At their foundation, the nine mostly midscale pieces in this thoroughly enjoyable exhibition seem to be digital photographs. The images -- most depict young girls in whimsical hats -- are fanciful almost to the point of silliness. Across the surface of these images, however, Heid has inscribed a layer of embellishment that sweeps them clear beyond silliness, through kitsch and into the realm of magnificently extravagant fantasy.

There are sequins, beads, Austrian crystals, pearls, feathers, cloth flowers, silk embroidery and gold and silver bullion, all sewn in dense, colorful patterns onto the canvas. The loveliest is “Briar Rose,” a charming, slightly melancholy Rapunzel, profiled against a swirl of glittering flowers, ladybugs and hummingbirds.

Patricia Correia Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., E-2, Santa Monica, (310) 264-1760, through June 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.