The story of modern Hong Kong, described as being in a perennial state of limbo, suspended between East and West, is well told in this compact but extremely stimulating exhibition, primarily of photographs that highlight Hong Kong's contemporary art as well as some important historical points in its historical development.

Lo Koon Chiu's illustrations of happy peasant faces and festivals, inspired by both traditional ink and folk-art traditions, achingly yearn for a mythic, lost paradise that finds universal resonance.

Yau Leung's boldly designed and subtly naughty photographic images of Hong Kong in the 1950s and '60s cast a cold but laser-like eye on the social landscape at a time of profound cultural and social change.

Vincent Yu, "Deng Xiaoping in Subway," 1994. Angst over the resumption of Chinese control of Hong Kong fills Yu's work with a palpable Munch-like anxiety of muffled screams lurking beneath placid faces. Photos of artwork by David C. Farmer • Special to The Advertiser

Chu Hing Wah, "City Moon," 2004. Our critic found the East-West Center exhibition of contemporary Hong Kong art highly stimulating.

The pinhole photographs of Warren Leung, evocative of photography's earliest images, communicate post-1997 visions at once nostalgic and ominous, feelings no doubt expressive of the current mood of this incredible world metropolis with its frenetic market culture so far prospering in the shadow of an emerging world giant.

The wistful ink and color works on paper by Chu Hing Wah summon up a kind of naive detachment and alienation that intimates the loneliness of a mental hospital, a place where he once worked as a nurse.

"Mid-autumn" — Fiona Wong's light box made of black mountain clay, porcelain, and copper wire — contains a Braille version of the first two verses of a Chinese poem: "Moonlight by bedside/Frost on the floor." Like that of many of other new generation Hong Kong artists, her work effectively incorporates traditions from many times and places.

Leung Mee Ping's oddly disturbing installation "Memorize the future" consists of 1,000 of her nearly 10,000 shoe-shaped constructions she has fashioned, made of collected and hand-braided real hair from all parts of the world.

As curator Ho succinctly states in the catalogue, "It is exactly this ability to jump around from one culture to another that gives Hong Kong culture an extra energy."

The exhibition eloquently demonstrates this extra Hong Kong energy.

Graduate art exhibit

Included this year are extremely disparate works by Eli Baxter, Calvin Collins, Steve Coy, Deirdre Britt, Derek Erwin, Karen Goins, Mark Henderson, Kyoko Higuchi, Jon Ikegami, Jacob Jackson, Michelle Jones, Arn Krebs, Puni Kukahiko, Soonjurng Kwon, Julie Wooddell Laymon, Mark Maresca, Rob Molyneux, Alan P. Ness, George Newton, Keiko Ohnuma, Ben Pfister, Richard Romero, Kimberly Ruchaber, Doc Skoch, Madeline Soder, Allan Spindt, Anson Tsang and Thomas Wasson.

Especially effective are the mixed-media and glass works.

In "Remember When," Michelle Jones creates haunting, mixed-media glass-ball constructions, dream-referenced, internal organic forms frozen within, inspired by the artist's actual dreams.

"The Paradise Seekers," Puni Kukahiko's ingenious edible chocolate and light assemblage, explores and exploits the "Paradise" construct through the familiar images of Hawai'i tourism and culture.

Anson Tsang's "Wood and Steel." Tsang's work reflects sly humor, sometimes with a thought-provoking political aspect.

According to the artist, the piece "simultaneously exalts and denigrates our desires, allowing us to look at the comfort of consumption in a critical manner that is surprisingly fun."

Calvin Collins explores the very personal themes of familial connection and origins in his related mixed media pieces "Mater," "Pater," "Materia Prima" and "Fugitive."

Anson Tsang's tough and yet slyly wry wood-and-steel sculpture "Old Tricks for the Moral Majority or A Funny Thing Happened while Living in Sin, A Tribute to the Colonization of All Things Foreign" is an impressive achievement, both in terms of the use of materials as well as their somewhat twisted expressive function.

Eli Baxter's set of caged stuffed animals, especially "how can i possibly tell you how i feel?" are deceptively cute and menacingly erotic visual expressions of a surreal cartoon sensibility gone amok.

Painting is again in short supply in the exhibition.

"Remains," a large-scale oil on canvas by Julie Wooddell Laymon, is a notable exception.

Laymon states that her "work attempts to come to terms with my own culturally conflicted experiences and concepts of land and its changes over time. I endeavor to expand our notions of what constitutes land and landscape. It is a way to rectify our loss of cultural knowledge and history."

Deirdre Britt's intaglio and chine colle "Articles of Faith" is an installation that explores the relationship between visuals and text, using her own writing and art, as well as what is recovered printing plates and print fragments, to create etched, lithographed, and drawn book-like metaphoric pieces. (Chine colle is a sort-of-collage technique used in intaglio printing in which two papers are adhered and printed simultaneously.)

"My themes continue to examine spiritual truths in the midst of a physical reality: the nature and form of belief, the interconnectedness of life, the nature of soul," she says in her personal statement.

As in the work of all artists, the graduate-student works on display in this exhibition are informed by these kinds of continuing, unanswerable questions, and they arise from the artists' layers of personal history and experiences.

Ezra Pound called the artist "the antennae of the race." These exhibitions present persuasive evidence of this proposition.