The American dilemma: 'Points of Entry: Tracing Cultures.' (various artists, various galleries, Tuscon, Arizona; San Francisco and San Diego, California)

Leaving my country was not a simple task. I now realize that I never really left nor really arrived.

- Young Kim

The politics and ideology of identity investigation have emerged as part of an expansive discourse central to recent art. This arena of exploration is particularly relevant and powerful for artists who are immigrants to the United States, as the inherent dualities of living cross-cultural lives naturally informs their creative vision. The 11 artists included in "Tracing Cultures," curated by Friends of Photography director Andy Grundberg, offer a poignant view of the immigration experience. Their highly individual contextualizations of the photographic image address a full range of personal and political issues surrounding the contemporary experience of expatriation.

In order to fully comprehend the vanguard aesthetic stance taken by the artists represented in the exhibition, it is meaningful to consider their subjective approach to self-representation and its interwoven relationship with materials. Unlike "straight" documentary photographers who focus their lenses on the breadth of human dignity and suffering inherent in passage to and settlement in a new land, these individuals are involved with a language of conceptual and pictorial metaphor that informs and contextualizes their images. Central to these practices is the juxtaposition or incorporation of photographs with three-dimensional elements. Such tangible appositions create new associative relationships, infusing the photographic image with potential connotations that might otherwise remain hidden. The photograph becomes a site for consideration, in which meaning is informed by its strategically chosen setting.

The quintessential expression of such polysemous conceptual art practice is embodied in the work of Albert Chong. In a series of constructed images intended as an ongoing dialogue with the spirits of his ancestors, the artist fuses the practices inherent in his cosmological belief system with the processes of art making. Family portraits and objects - cowrie shells, fruit, flowers, bird talons and hair - become offerings that venerate his Chinese, African and Jamaican ancestry. The ethereal qualities created by a layered spatial image/object dynamic in works like What Will be Your Next Incarnation? (1990-94) and Aunt Winnie's Story (1994), imbue them with transcendent physical presence and a sense of spirituality and magic. They function as offerings to as well as dialogues with his forebears. The writing of personal narratives onto the copper frames of many pieces enables Chong's cultural and familial past to remain alive within the gestalt of his American present.

The intimate, biographical nature of Chong's work is a form shared by other artists, including Gavin Lee, Young Kim and Kim Yasuda. Lee's recent work, Concerning George: The Reading Room (1994), is an installation stimulated by the artist's recent discovery that his great-grandfather, George Lim Fong, attempted to assassinate a visiting Chinese government official in 1910, and was subsequently incarcerated in San Quentin Prison. To represent the event, Lee has embedded newspaper clippings, mug shots, court documents and penitentiary records into a nine-foot long library table. The prison-like austerity of the table is heightened by its stark lighting and three chairs that suggest but do not invite intended use. Lee's powerful synthesis of materials, form and content that pertain to investigative research also reveal the personal process he underwent to uncover this powerful piece of political information buried in the annals of his family's past.

In diametric contrast to Lee's detailed and well-documented unveiling of his personal heritage, Kim and Yasuda's explorations of family history and cultural origin purposefully allude to an absence of the past. In Kim's series "Distances" (1992), this sensibility is created by aged black and white family photographs seen through openings cut in wood panels that evoke windows to viewing distant recollections, enhanced by inscribed text. "Leaving my country was not a simple task. I now realize that I never really left or really arrived," the text explains about the artist's sense of increasing remoteness from her former life. Her work underscores the realization that personal, social and cultural definitions of "home" remain fluid as the process of relocation continues to unfold and shape the form and content of retrospection.

Of all the work in the exhibition, Yasuda's reflects the most complex relationship with memory, taking the construct of photography as a mirror on the past to its extreme by literally eliminating the medium, but not its function. Her piece, She Was Both from the installation "Hereditary Memories" (1991), hauntingly conveys the psychological ambiguity of her unknown heritage through physical and conceptual means by playing with the spectral qualities of light reflected on mirrored surfaces, and casting shadows of subjects that do not match viewers' expectations. This mechanism appropriately concretizes Yasuda's ongoing search for her hidden lineage. Here, the reflected projection of the words "innate" and "acquired" from inside two wall-mounted drawers that alternately open and shut each other, underscores Yasuda's frustrated search for this critical biological information in places that, in their consistent emptiness, suggest the need to fill the unknown portions of her past with genealogical details of her choosing.

The pervasive human need to create personal mythologies as a means to reconcile the dualities of pluralistic cultural experiences is central to the work of other artists in "Tracing Cultures." In his series, "Portraying a White God" (1989), Dinh Q. Le, a Vietnamese native, positions his identity in relation to Western biblical legends to dissect meaning and create new archetypal myths expressing a sense of "otherness." Le has ingeniously defined his experience through the fragmentation and reweaving of photographic images of himself within photographic copies of historic paintings that illustrate New Testament tales. These pieces make tangible the necessary process of intertwining personal identity with that of a new homeland. In works like Self Portrait with Angel from the Perussis Alterpiece (1990), he foregrounds the grim reality of his immigrant experience by placing his visage behind a barred window within a seraph's body, to express confinement and the ongoing potential or desire to take flight.

The fine line between assimilation and entrapment Le consistently expresses in such images is also inherent in the work of I.T.O., a Japanese born artist. I.T.O. addresses the value and problematic nature of capitalism and colonialism by juxtaposing food and eating utensils with historic photographic portraits. The contiguity of portraits of U.S. military heroes with plastic sushi that moves in a circle beneath their images in #031 Ethnocentrism II-The Revenge of Sushi, from the series "Interculturalism" (1990-1995), raises questions concerning the politics of cultural fusion and ethnic/race relations in our society. In his large scale chromogenic prints, Ruben Ortiz Torres also captures the political tensions brought on by American cultural dominance and imposition of values throughout the world. His portrait Venderemos/Sandino & Mickey in a Restaurant, Mexico City, Mexico (1991), is especially poignant in conveying this ethnocentric stance. By positioning the male protagonist holding a Mickey Mouse figure before a mural of Walt Disney and his rodent creation, the image evokes the insidious truths underlying the smiling facades of those in possession of power and control.

The masking of truths behind multiple facades is addressed by other artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Lewis deSoto and the collaborative team of Komar and Melamid. In her "Africa" (1993) series, Weems simply and powerfully confronts the horrific history of African slavery through images of Goree Island, a beautiful tropical haven. According to Weems, of the 100 million Africans shipped from the island, only 22 million survived the passage - yet not a single story of that passage exists. The atrocities of the journey are accentuated by Weems's conceptual contrast of the aesthetically beautiful exterior architecture of the dungeons to the Auschwitz-like atrocities that transpired within their walls. The seduction of the architecture's formal grace with the horrors of slavery enables Weems to speculate about her heritage, as she considers the possibility that her great grandmother could have come through that place, connecting Weems to a sense of having a greater past.

DeSoto and Komar and Melamid also explore the significance of place to express individual cultural heritage. Komar and Melamid present the most positive view of a comparatively open U.S. immigration policy in their "Bayonne" series of photographs (1990), in which famous landmarks from abroad like the Kremlin and the Sphinx are fused with images of the ethnically diverse town of Bayonne, New Jersey. Their juxtapositions of the monumental and the mundane provide a lighter moment in the exhibition through a sense of kitsch compared to the more sobering introspection of most of the work included. DeSoto's photographic work arranged cruciform, Tehualtapa (Hill of the Ravens), (1987-88), is less visually compelling compared to other works, but conceptually so in reflecting the history of the sacred Cahuilla site held by various invaders: the Spanish (who renamed it Cerrito Solo); white settlers (who renamed it Marble Mountain); and pioneer Isaac Slover who lived in its shadow (for whom it was renamed Mt. Slover). DeSoto's explanation of the site's history and meaning exposes the profound differences in world view and attitudes toward nature and between native peoples and white invaders/settlers, reminding us of the pervasive sense of entitlement and appropriation practiced by those in power. The piece emphasizes how the difficult experiences of native peoples in the U.S. can serve as more general metaphors for the divisiveness between peoples based on ethnicity and race and the need to address issues of difference.

The value of such work is reinforced by the fact that the power of representation should rest with those who are represented, enabling cultural migrants to directly express their own experiences. As Maria Martinez-Canas so eloquently states in reference to her work, which is based on and incorporates Cuban stamps as symbols of transit to understanding her roots: "A stamp is something used to send, to dispatch, to bring news; it suggests the idea of a journey, of physical travel. If a map is used to find and locate, then a stamp is used to send, separate, and deliver, and to bring closer and reconcile. In this way, these stamps become an essential instrument in coming closer to a personal sense of my Cuban identity." Photography provides a means toward understanding evolving personal and cultural identities, and in the context of "Tracing Cultures," serves as a critical means of preserving cultural heritage.

TERRI COHN is a San Francisco-based writer, curator, lecturer and artist.