Blossoming buzz

THE accidental tourist rounding the corner onto Chinatown’s Chung King Road one recent Saturday night could not have been faulted for believing he had walked in on a housewarming bash.

Revelers hugging cans of beer and smoking cigarettes chatted outside a lighted, seemingly empty storefront. Inside, a desk and a computer in the back were the only furnishings visible from the street, and only observant visitors would have spotted the two life-sized blossoms, delicately rendered in wood by Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda, that were pinned to the whitewashed walls well above eye level.

It was opening night for Suda’s “Lotus of Wood” installation at Chung King Project gallery, a new kid on Chinatown’s art-themed block. The 6-month-old enterprise began last fall as a synergistic franchise among three established galleries, one based in London, one in Berlin and one in Los Angeles. The gallery has showcased artists who are established abroad but have never been displayed in the Southland. Its presence encapsulates the low-key charm and can-do spirit of what many connoisseurs consider the most exciting art scene on the local circuit.

Chinatown fosters risk and enterprise, the gallerists who work there say, and a vibe of genuine camaraderie uncharacteristic in the upper echelons of the art biz. Its cachet as a haven where exciting things happen outside the spotlight is complemented by the number of interesting personalities operating there.

Chung King Project’s principals are a case in point: Mihai Nicodim is a Romanian-born artist who jumped into the art-trade fray three years ago when he launched Kontainer gallery. His primary operation focuses on up-and-coming British talent and is nestled mid-Wilshire among established players ACME. and Roberts & Tilton.

“Wilshire is a bit more blue chip,” he says, “and Chinatown has matured nicely. I always liked it, and I always wanted to have a gallery there.”

When the opportunity to branch out on Chung King Road arose last year, he asked friends at London’s f a projects, Nicholas Baker and Zoe Foster, to partner up with him. They suggested adding a friend from Berlin to the mix: Friedrich Loock of Wohnmaschine, who got his start staging underground art exhibitions in his East Berlin apartment while the Wall was still standing.

The European-based partners say they plan to travel to L.A. eight to 10 times a year to strategize and confabulate with Nicodim.

The serious competition already afoot in the area, Nicodim says, is stimulating.

“Here come the godfathers of Chinatown,” he announces as three young men troop into his Chung King Project space to bestow their blessings on Suda’s Saturday night soiree. Steve Hanson of China Art Objects, Parker Jones of Black Dragon Society and Daniel Hug (who besides running a namesake space nearby also teamed up with Joel Messler to launch a side project called Rental Gallery on Mei Ling Way) are dressed in casual denims and look, in fact, very unlike Mafiosi. Their clout, however, gives their art community backbone.

Hanson opened China Art Objects in 1999, opting, like many art dealers in the area, to keep the name bestowed on the space by a previous tenant. Now more than a dozen galleries pepper the neighborhood, some regularly scoring invites to top-tier art-world events, including New York’s Armory Show and Miami’s Art Basel fair.

“Locally, I’d say Chinatown is the only actual art scene that is functioning as such at the moment,” says Doug Harvey, an art critic with the L.A. Weekly who chronicled the Chinatown renaissance in 2000. “Internationally, it’s created the biggest buzz of anything since [Santa Monica’s] Food House in the early ‘90s.”

Although L.A. nowadays gets props alongside Berlin for being a production epicenter in contemporary art, its profile as a trade center has been rising too.

During the day, a Chinese grocer sells fresh fruit one door down from Chung King Project, and neighborhood children ride their bicycles past the entrance. But art hounds, such as the Italian collector who Loock says spent $22,000 opening night to acquire one of Suda’s magenta-pigmented magnolias, are not fooled by the modest surroundings. After the opening, Michael Ovitz (one of Hollywood’s most serious art collectors) sent an emissary to check out the exhibition, and curator James Elaine of the UCLA Hammer Museum stopped by early one afternoon too. Despite the fact that some of the galleries on Chung King Road operate on a punk-rock schedule -- open weekend nights and whenever else they darn well please -- business does go on.

“L.A. is very happening, maybe because most people think they can get in at the ground level, because the scene is not overcrowded and that there’s space to get in,” Elaine said. “The museums are happening here and the galleries are happening too. L.A. is becoming a real player in the international scene, and it’s a cycle that feeds on itself.”

The Chinatown community has so far functioned primarily as a hothouse for talent siphoned from area art schools, but Chung King Project and other spaces are also bringing in artists via their international contacts. In January, Florian Merkel, a mid-career German artist who had never shown in the States, had an exhibition at Chung King, and the gallery’s next show will feature Dutch painter Arjan van Helmond. His dreamy, slightly off-kilter representational renderings of interiors had earned him a fan base in Europe but no shows in the U.S.

Rental Gallery goes about its business in much the same way, working on shows with Galerie Christian Nagel in Cologne, Germany.

“That kind of flexibility seems like it’s much more written into the landscape in Los Angeles -- lots of people have second spaces there,” notes Baker on the phone from London.

Loock, who represents Suda in Berlin, says that it was thanks only to his involvement in the Chinatown gallery that he was able to showcase the artist’s work in L.A. for the first time.

“We realized that there are a lot of galleries in Los Angeles who are taking very good care of the locals,” Loock added. “It’s a question whether it’s necessary for us to jump into this competition, or if it’s rather interesting to pursue our own strengths and bring in exciting artists from abroad.”

Baker adds that “over time, it’d be great if the gallery does develop its own profile and perhaps its own stable of artists. But for now I think it’s also interesting to see how it can function in between spaces and between relationships.”

It doesn’t hurt, in the meantime, that good, inexpensive restaurants are situated nearby, and that Chung King Project’s rent runs only $2,000 a month.

“In practical terms, I think it’s much easier to do it there than it is in New York,” Baker says. “You take a space in Chelsea the same size like the one we have in Chinatown and it would be very difficult to take many risks. But there’s something about L.A., and Chinatown in particular, that seems to suggest possibilities and potential for operating outside of one’s normal framework.”

At Suda’s opening, Hug mused that the Zen koan vibe reminded him of an exhibition he once hosted showcasing British artist Ceal Floyer.

“British?” Nicodim interrupts. “Hey man, you’re stepping on my turf!”

“Naah ... I have the Germans,” Hug says with a shrug, then grabs another beer from the cooler and steps back outside to mingle.