Stella Lai and Iona Rozeal Brown at Saltworks

After a successful collaboration in San Francisco in 2004, Stella Lai and Iona Rozeal Brown brought their talents together again for the exhibition "When the East Is in the House." Their individual paintings filled most of the gallery, but a jointly created mural deftly interwove their respective cultures and artistic styles.

Brown is interested in the globalization of hip-hop culture, especially as it has spread to Asia. She is known for her ongoing series of stylized portraits inspired by Japanese youths who imitate African-American hip-hop in dress and posture, sometimes even to the point of blackening their faces. In 2005, she received a six-month residency in Japan, where she studied Kabuki theater. The influence of the trip is evident in the mural, in which her stylized figures take on specific roles against Lai's elegant landscape.

Floating in the sky is Brown's goddess of hip-hop, "ooo-ma." Speech bubbles emerging from her head traverse Lai's clouds and mountainscapes, spreading the gift of gab to ooo-ma's chosen followers. Three African-American men in hip-hop garb receive ooo-ma's word on the left side of the mural, while three Asian men in similar attire receive it on the right. At the center of the mural, symbolizing the distance between the two groups of figures--both in terms of physical location and cultural differentiation--is a large painted tree that Lai has decorated with Chinese tissue-paper cutouts. At the bottom right, one of the goddess's followers prepares to stomp on a group of small wormlike figures, familiar from other Brown works, which she calls "w.o.i.m.s." (weapons of irrepressible mass spending). They're intended to represent all that has gone wrong with hip-hop culture.

A critique of consumerism runs through both artists' individual bodies of work. Among Lai's 12 pieces included in the show is a subtle but powerful series of gouaches on paper that explore the plight of teenage girls exploited as sexual toys in Hong Kong's red-light district. The silhouetted figures in suggestive poses remain almost hidden within Lai's geometrically patterned surfaces accented with chrysanthemum and lotus flowers. Brown's acrylic paintings on paper and panel focus more on the behavioral excesses that have invaded hip-hop culture. Many of her solitary figures have their mouths, wrists, fingers or sexual organs covered with viruslike forms intended to critique the commercialization and degradation of the genre and the undermining of its early, positively subversive role models.

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