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REVIEWS

sent many views of nature at once, a range of phenomena without a unifying focus. The result is a wonderful, shimmery experience of illusion, pattern, and light. 

Unlike the more heroically scaled paintings that invite comparisons to the work of Ross Bleckner and Pat Steir, the small paintings allow Mazur's virtuosity to find its fullest expression. These works employ a singular and mesmerizing technique of monotype on synthetic silk, in which multiple colors of oil-ink are forced into the material with the assistance of a printing press, then overlaid with another layer of oil-ink painted on by hand. In Snow Pine, 1994, the silk gives a simple study in blacks and grays a richly luminous quality creating a pearly, close-grained haze similar to that achieved by sfumato or a rich mezzotint. What might these magical novelties look like under the changing conditions of natural light? These small, intricate works remain a lingering mystery. 

-Justin Spring

"ASIA/AMERICA" 
ASIA SOCIETY

Presenting the work of 20 artists hailing from eight different Asian nations, "Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary AsianAmerican Art" was an articulate response to the failure of the art world to adopt a truly multicultural agenda. In her catalogue essay, curator Margo Machida charges that the existing system has not yet addressed the very complicated questions that surround identity for contemporary Asian-American artists. With this show, Machida attempted to reflect the diversity of the Asian-American scene, refusing to present either a forced homogeneity or to cater to pervasive Western taste. 

Machida used four overlapping categories which reflected the everyday realities that determine the nature of Asian-American identity and experience-issues raised in different ways by the artworks themselves-to organize the works in the exhibition. Standout efforts in the first category, "Traversing Cultures," included Long Nguyen's haunting oil painting Soul Boat No. 2, 1990, depicting his escape from Vietnam in 1975, and Zarina's arrangement of a series of wall-mounted minihouses, cast in aluminum, entitled House on Wheels, 1991, which explores the psychological disturbance in moving from one's homeland to a new country. 

The second category, "Situating," included the fold-inspired works of Toi Ungkavatanapong, whose small, preciously jury-rigged "spirit houses" recall those found in rural Thailand, and Pacita Abad's rich, quiltlike, mixed-media collages that recount the experience of a Philippine immigrant in America. Also bracketed within this category were the explosive, fragmented paintings of Ken Chu, which, with equal amounts of rage and healing humor, target damaging Orientalist stereotypes. The challenges of coming to terms with bicultural identity were also addressed, albeit very differently, in outstanding sculptural works by Baochi Zhang and Yong Soo Min, strong installations by May Sun and Jin Soo Kim, and in the powerful, deadpan photographic self-portraits of the late Tseng Kwong Chi. 

Machida's third category, "Speaking to and of Asia," included works that addressed the difficult problem of looking back at one's homeland from a transformed perspective, such as the hybrid symbolist canvases of Mitsuo Toshida, as well as Masami Teraoka's sexy, comic dramas, printed in a traditional Japanese mode, which lay bare the complications of cultural difference and desire. 

Finally, historical perspectives were explored in works designated by Machida as "Addressing East-West Interaction." Philippine-Americans Manuel Ocampo and Marlon Fuentes unpacked the tangled cultural codes that are the legacy of European colonialism, the former by appropriating the language of Spanish colonial painting, and the latter by means of surrealistic black and white photographs. The painter Hung Liu's investigation of gender and culture yielded rich, layered canvases that problematize historical stereotypes of Chinese women, works that were complemented by Hanh Thi Pham's Cindy Sherman-like, photographic tableaux vivant, featuring herself and others in scenarios enacting patterns of mutual voyeurism and misunderstanding between Vietnamese and Americans.

Admittedly, the heterogeneity of artistic strategies proffered by "Asia/America" was somewhat disorienting, due in part to the limited institutional precedent for understanding the issues at stake here, and especially to Machida's willful bypassing of familiar curatorial taxonomies- at once the show's weakness and its stubborn strength. "Asia/America" demanded that we rethink the multicultural agenda, calling for a shift away from showcasing art stars within the same old mainstream hierarchies toward representing the depth and diversity of what existing minority artists have to offer. 

-Jenifer P. Borum

KYUNG-KIM LEE
SIGMA GALLERY 

Kyung-Lim Lee investigates the legacy of abstraction through the filter of Asian and American cultures. The paintings and drawings in their most recent show reflected a concern with series and process, but they also depended on her appropriation of Chinese characters. For works such as Circle and Ellipse #2, 1993, Ellipse #1, 1991, and Trapezoid, 1991, Lee began with a Chinese-Korean dictionary, selecting ten characters of the ten-stroke type. Working with the written Chinese and its direct Korean translation, she set about exploring the meaning of each character from a personal perspective, devising charts and diagrams to record the duality inherent in ideographic structure. 

As a group, the characters denoted a whole range of things from the concrete to the abstract - from body, skill fighting, leaping, and chignon to spirit, ghost, empty, high, and melancholy. For Lee, the character for chignon not only is a female Symbol associated with the traditional hairstyle of young female servants in Korea, but also recalls the geometry of Ellipse #1.  With its wavy folds, the quasi-organic ellipse was suggestive of the natural world. 

What makes Lee's work spring to life is her assured handling of materials- graphite, pencil, ink, acrylic, oil, and watercolor,- that animate her imagery, lending her forms a compelling vitality. This quality is readily apparent in Circle and Ellipse #2, a triptych in pencil and ink that has the monumental presence of a painting. As with her other works, the contrast between the soft ellipse and crisp circle creates a chain of cosmic associations that point toward an almost religious preoccupation with the cycles of the sun and moon. 

- Ronny Cohen

CAROLEE SCHNEMANN
PENINE-HART GALLERY

With a knack for identifying and then violating taboos, Carolee Schneemann makes work that gets inexorably under your skin. During the "sexual revolution," her performance piece Meat Joy, 1964, revealed in appetites of and for the flesh in a manner that rendered even the most hardened squeamish. (Deemed pornographic by some, Schneeman's work has, for the most part, been marginalized, despite its connection to displays of masculine excess usually considered vanguard.)

With typical unflinching candor, her most recent work, Mortal Coils, 1994, honed in on death, not as the kind of abstract loss signaled by, say, Christian Boltanski's memorials, but, rather, reflecting on the real anguish experienced upon the death of art-world friends and