'Bling BlAsian Bling'
Through May 8, Luggage Store Gallery

IN RECENT YEARS Japan has witnessed the emergence of a subculture of teenage girls, known as ganguro or black face, who braid their hair in cornrows, adorn themselves in bling-bling, and mimic Missy Elliott. Iona Rozeal Brown takes these ganguro as her muse in her contribution to the current exhibition at the Luggage Store Gallery, "Bling BlAsian Bling." She stages the hip-hopification of Japanese culture through a series of paintings in the style of 17th- and 18th-century wood-block prints, in which what otherwise appear to be traditional figures from Japanese art, including geishas and courtesans, are transformed by the conventions of hip-hop culture. Their skin is turning brown. Their bodies are voluptuous. And they sport the styles of African American hipsters. A woman with reddish-black braids squeezes her heavy tit, plays with her excessively long nails, and licks her lips like Lil' Kim. A man with dreadlocks has his boxer shorts sticking out of the top of his pants. He scowls, grabs his jock, and drinks from a studded chalice, while a woman with an Afro and clunky jewelry kneels before him smoking a blunt. The paintings draw on the surprising stylistic affinities between these two disparate cultures, revealing a common grace in the graffiti line and calligraphic brush stroke, along with a common cultural object in the decorated, subservient woman. But Brown also treats the confluence of the cultures as absurd, employing the juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern, the Japanese and the African American, as a Brechtian alienation effect to explore the constitution of racial identity. As an African American woman and (apparent) hip-hop devotee, she examines the reduction of "blackness" to a fetish object appropriated across cultural lines. The paintings' monstrous figures betray a resentment of the ganguros' identification with hip-hop culture. At the same time, Brown treats hip-hop as a grotesque brand of consumerism. Her paintings are often infested with graffiti-style worms that feast on her figures like a scourge on the traditional Japanese ideal of beauty. Brown's figures are both avatars of a new cultural pluralism and racist caricatures of a consumerist society. Through their hyper-stylization, they work to articulate the social contradictions embodied in the ganguro. "Bling BlAsian Bling" also includes a series of colorful, highly graphic paintings by local artist Stella Lai that mix flowers, patterns, and urban landscapes inhabited by tiny girls wearing animal masks. The paintings appear to tell stories and to hint at an ambivalence between innocence and vice. What they are doing in a show titled "Bling BlAsian Bling," I don't know. Wed.-Sat., noon- 5 p.m., and by appt., 1007 Market, S.F. (415) 255-5971. (Clark Buckner)