Neil Wax, David E. Stone, Young Kyun Lim

Neil Wax exercises an uncanny ability to emulate the graphic sensibility of the supermarket shelf to subversive but touching ends. For instance, Wax labels various cleaning- and personal-care-product containers with “grief,” “guilt,” “pity” and other venal (and a few deadly) sins — lettered and annotated in perfect name-brand logoese. And he takes a stylized image of a house and subjects it to all sorts of natural (and a few unnatural) disasters, all depicted in international-symbol shorthand. For his part, David E. Stone follows a more erratic but no less witty conceptual trail, alighting upon strategies as diverse as producing a photograph of the side of an art book (confounding ideas of image and value), labeling a white, paper drinking cup “LARGE CUP” (is a “VENTI” next?), and isolating the stage directions from Waiting for Godot onto cards, as if they were Fluxus event scores. The mischievous Fluxus movement, of course, made such comic conceptualism the currency of contemporary discourse, and no Fluxster pranked harder or deeper than Nam June Paik. In his later years, the recently deceased musician–artist–video pioneer became a South Korean living treasure in exile, and Young Kyun Lim, one of Korea’s most prominent photographers, became Paik’s visual Boswell, documenting the public and private moments of his last quarter century. Several of the master’s Zen-vaudeville objects spice the memorial selection of Lim’s lensical Paikophilia. Neil Wax and David E. Stone at Gallery Revisited, 3204 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake; Wed.-Sun., noon-6 p.m.; thru Oct. 7. (626) 253-5266. Young Kyun Lim and Nam June Paik at AndrewShire Gallery, 3850 Wilshire Blvd., No. 107, L.A.; Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru Sept. 30. (213) 389-2601.

—Peter Frank