Buddha! Buddha! Buddha!

Further east, a somewhat different twist on Orientalism is manifesting itself in the small cluster of contemporary artist-run spaces that have opened up in Chinatown over the last year. Surreally embedded in the picturesque peeling storefronts of pedestrian-only Chung King Road, the Black Dragon Society, like New China Arts up the block before it, has adopted the name that came with the space, and run with it. To open the former kung fu studio’s second season, Los Angeles‘ favorite free-range Zen cowboy and gooshy minimalist painter, James Hayward, has curated a show of more than three dozen L.A.-based abstract painters titled Under 500, referring to the maximum square inches of canvas participants were allowed to submit. Although the Black Dragon’s core membership, which reads like a heretical ninja splinter group from Ace gallery, has enough connections to pull in local painting heroes such as Ed Moses and Carl Benjamin, more than half the show is devoted to lesser-known or recently graduated artists. And there are probably three times as many where they came from.

In spite of its currency as L.A.‘s house style, much abstract painting continues deeply underground due to its lack of ironic and dissipated self-loathing, the trademark of its more acceptable kin. In spite of the return of imagery brought about by Pop Art, nonrepresentational painting has maintained a strong and continuous process since its heyday in the 1950s, evolving along innumerable hidden byways like a secret religious cult. A lot of the energy needed to keep working under such circumstances is attributable to the frankly spiritual tone of the rationalizations and intended effects of much of the work. While some of the superficial beatnik-Buddhist affectations surrounding the genre can be unconvincing or downright embarrassing, the commitment to the reduction of painterly activity to its simplest components, to bridging the gap between thought and action, and to finding a structure in which every gesture is luminous, spontaneous and clear, is undeniably manifest in the material presence of the paintings themselves. Services are held Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m.