OPENINGS ALEXANDER KU.

According to the teachings of the Buddha, there is an eightfold path that leads to Enlightenment. This course--calling for the cultivation of right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration--is eccentrically reimagined in Alexander Ku's brief video The 8-Fold Path, 1997, set in New York's Chinatown, more precisely in a digitally simulated Canal Street bank. A number of Chinese Americans with George Washington heads grafted to their bodies are lined up in front of eight cashiers' windows (leading, we assume, to a Western Nirvana) when an archetypal American guy--tough-looking, sporting an Abe Lincoln head--enters and tries to cut in front. "Hey, there's a line, asshole," shouts one of the Washingtons in Cantonese. A ritualistic fight ensues: Blood and teeth hit the floor; a gunshot sounds, and the Abe guy falls dead. Pandemonium gives way to Buddhist chanting, and as the camera pans the room, everyone present is examined according to the criteria of thirty-two b odily features that mark the Buddha: "well-planted feet," "long fingers," and so on. But these signs should not be trusted, teaches the Lotus Sutra, handbook of the sixth-century Chinese T'ien T'ai school of thought. They are characteristics of the physical body, not the real Dharma body. So, is Abe the Buddha? To me the answer remains something of a mystery.

What is clear, however--and not only from this piece--is that Ku is engaged in an exploration of what it means to be Asian in the US. Some years ago he performed a hands-and-knees crawl through the streets of Chinatown. "I'm searching on the street for something I can't find," he explained, "which is the essence of Chinatown, or my identity, or answers of some kind. I can't find them. There's nothing to find. All I'm left with is the pants." The resulting installation ("Search," 1993, at American Fine Arts in New York) featured about a dozen pairs of chinos mounted on stretchers, each knee worn threadbare from Ku's urban crawl. Pieces of asphalt were displayed as well, like geological specimens on a pedestal, and a sign on the wall offered an addendum evoking grade-school racist taunts: "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these." Another project tackled the issue of East-West culture clashes, drawing on a derisive metaphor. In China, foreigners are often referred to as dogs; "The Mission," 1995, found K u merging images of himself with pictures of various canine breeds to produce eleven photo portraits depicting oddly elegant dog-men. The work also included a pair of video monitors. One showed the artist at table with his four-legged companions, host and guests dressed in dinner jackets. (The installation featured not only the staged spectacle but also the props: filthy tuxedos and a soiled tablecloth.) The other brought a frightening intruder to Ku's little party: a mythological cyborg killer-dog from the future holding a huge gun in his metal hand.

Expanding on the pitfalls of Asian American alienation, other works by Ku--including two animated films produced in collaboration with Steve Choo and Kelly Chang recently shown at P.S. 1's "Greater New York"--address problems of human estrangement less local to the artist's ethnic identity. The deadpan Steve, 1999, is a send-up of the generic office environment in the US--or any corporate culture, for that matter. Its minimal plotline introduces viewers to Steve, an employee who has quit his job. His computer still sits on his table. That's all. But what makes the work memorable is its account of the breakdown of language: In this milieu, words are spoken, sentences exchanged without anything of consequence being communicated; "good," "great," and "sure" are just noises uttered to fill the void, to punctuate the office tedium. The Tree, 1999, moves toward similar conclusions but uses an alternate route. An amusingly long and complicated saga revolving around a cherry tree--and touching on love, sex, violence , time, remembrance, and a cherry pit stuck in a man's cross-trainer--is packed into a short film that consists of a few images drawn in black pen; occasional fields of red represent a variety of subjects, including rage, lost virginity, and, of course, the cherry itself. The economy of visual means s effective: The drawings, some of which appear for just a fraction of a second, are striking in their stylized sparseness. The plot, by contrast, is deliberately excessive, told at top speed in a breathless little girl's voice that never pauses. It's her childish enthusiasm about the story rather than the story itself that becomes the focus of the work: Her extreme eagerness to narrate turns the narration in on itself; again, language takes center stage at the moment when its efficacy is brought into question.

With the simplest of means, Ku's animated films create psychologically twisted situations that make explicit the various ways language operates (or fails to operate) when it dwindles into stupidity or, as Wittgenstein wrote, "goes on holiday." Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Ku's most enigmatic work to date is silent. In Kind, 1997, there is no narrative, only a sequence of images: the succession of three figures in front of a curtain. The mythology that unfolds is unknown to me, though it gives the impression of incorporating elements from familiar sources. Much as Ku's language-based works pare words down to scarcely significant chunks of meaning, or even mere elemental sounds, this piece seems to enact the emergence of a myth at some kind of primal ground zero, divested of all its accumulated cultural significance. A moist blob of a creature with a fat neck appears first. Something moves inside; either the creature's breath or its beating heart. A hole opens in the forehead like a third eye, and light g ushes out. The second figure is metallic and muscular, a male human body without a head, like the Acephalus glorified by Georges Bataille: "Man has escaped his head as the convict escapes from prison." Instead of a neck, there's a cavity dribbling blood. Finally the third figure arrives: a kind of balloon man completely lacking in heroic qualities who bounces pathetically back and forth. To grasp the import of this peculiar parade, I again scrutinize the Lotus Sutra, then all the other Sutras. But all in vain, because this is the very birth of mythology. These figures have no meaning yet. Once they take their place, though, the rest may follow: language, history, East and West, Chinatown, chinos, and the menacing canine assassin from the future. E

Daniel Bimbaum isa contributing editor of Artforum.