It’s Chinatown

Polanski & Towne‘s lasting cinematic mythology notwithstanding, something good appears to be happening in Chinatown. Over the last year and a half, the picturesque, dilapidated neighborhood, tucked under the northeast armpit of the Civic Center, has seen a curious influx. A collection of young art galleries has taken advantage of the modest rents and high vacancy rate in the tourist quarter to stake their claim, effectively taking over the mantle of energy and risk forsaken by the Michigan Avenue Galleries in their relocation to the “Pentad” 6150 Wilshire complex.

Clustered mainly on Chung King Road, a pedestrian-only thoroughfare just west of Hill Street, the galleries occupy various boarded-up businesses. With the renewed artistic and academic enthusiasm for Orientalism and exotica, this seemingly incongruous melding of a rickety but still-kicking theme neighborhood with a self-organizing enclave of hip cultural entrepreneurs possesses a perverse logic. And it’s one that‘s paid off.

Just a few blocks from MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, the Chinatown galleries benefit from the relative geographical isolation of the freeway peninsula they occupy. Chinatown mixes the weekend bustle of downtown, Latino Broadway with the pedestrian-friendly, restaurant-riddled funk of Venice. Conspicuously absent is the spill-over desperation from the Nickel that has interfered with other attempts to reanimate the downtown art scene: none of those scary street people that LACE escaped by moving to Hollywood Boulevard.

Creative types have always hung around Chinatown. Mike Kelley re-created the famous outdoor Wishing Well for a 1999 piece entitled Frame & Unframed (which has never been shown in L.A.). The Hong Kong Cafe is arguably the most legendary of the ‘80s L.A. punk clubs, a legacy acknowledged in a limited-edition print, by Frances Stark and China Art Objects partner Steve Hanson, based on an old Chinatown post card which, on close inspection, reveals the Black Flag logo graffitied prominently on the side of a building.

China Art Objects was the first of the galleries to open, and it was calculated to make an impression on the art world. Founded in January 1999 by Art Center alums Hanson, Giovanni Intra and Peter Kim, along with Kim’s landlord, Mark Heffernan, China Art Objects has enlisted high-profile locals like Pae White (who designed the space and the inaugural show), Jorge Pardo, Laura Owens and Sharon Lockhart in order to garner attention for the space and its lesser-known artists. Among these, Christiana Glidden, Eric Wesley, Ruby Neri and Jon Pylypchuk have been responsible for some of the most interesting and entertaining gallery shows in the last year. Pylypchuk is currently attending UCLA graduate school and is part of the same “Royal Art Lodge of Canada” group that produced Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber, whose cartoons pay the rent at Richard Heller Gallery. A.k.a. Rudy Bust, Pylypchuk hot-glues gnarly fabric samples, wiggle eyes and doodled-on matchsticks in loopy narrative concoctions (last seen at Works on Paper, in January); he has a show opening May 6.

In fact, four in five of the Chinatown galleries have scheduled openings for May 6, Sigmund Freud‘s 144th birthday. Directly across the way from China Art Objects, Goldman Tevis is the latest addition to the Chinatown scene, and its appearance is slightly unsettling, with its dyed-in-the-wool credibility and polished presentation standing out from the shagginess of its predecessors. Co-directors Mary Goldman and John Tevis come from international curatorial and East Coast investment-banking backgrounds, respectively, and moved to L.A. specifically to collaborate on this gallery. While this sudden swooping into the midst of an essentially artist-run milieu has generated some understandable anxiety, the inaugural show by Andrea Bowers contained the best drawings I’ve seen in a while. Tom Baldwin‘s upcoming installation at Goldman Tevis, consisting of a suspended plywood lagoon and various phenomenological extrapolations thereof (e.g., a window in the shape of a human head, photos of reflections off an actual lagoon -- you know), sounds promising as well.

The Black Dragon Society, like China Art Objects, took its name from the still-intact signage of the previous tenant, in this case a kung-fu studio. ACE Gallery refugee Roger Herman and partners draw alternately on their pals from the downtown L.A. art scene and from their European connections to serve up heaps of that ’80s Sturm und Drang we all miss so much. The refreshing “nothing to prove” vibe is undercut by the gallery‘s weekends-only-if-that hours. They’ll be open May 6 for certain, though, with an exhibit of quintessential New Image paintings by Austrian Beatrice Dreux, which, due to scheduling issues, had to open a couple of weeks early.

INMO, the dealer-eponymous gallery, opened on Valentine‘s Day (also Inmo’s birthday) last year, making it the second oldest of the spaces. For May 6, INMO is hosting a group show of figurative art curated by artist-critic Chris Miles, featuring new works by painters Kelly McLane (pop-surrealist humananimal social critiques) and Patty Wickman (complex poetic allegories, and late of Dan Bernier Gallery) and three others. INMO is most remarkable for its commitment to the topical overlap between art and architecture. Three out of six upcoming shows are projects by architects, including a temporary facade by Michele Saee and work by the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Design‘s Greg Lynn.