Neither this nor that - identity-based art, various artists, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, New York

In Cambodia, ranks of mammoth stone Buddhas sit silently among the ruins at Angkor Wat, decapitated by means of looters who sell the heads to tourists and museums around the world. In Buffalo, photographer Dinh Q Le mountained the image of one like disfigured statue in a lightbox, and hung it upon a wall facing a small pedestal upon which sits an undersized cast reproduction of the missing head. A gallery visitor witnessing this reunion is caught in the space between the sum of two units objects, an unwitting accomplice to the act of cross-cultural vandalism.

In a catalog interview with Allan deSouza, Le describes the installation as, among other things, the self-portrait of a man who lives in the United States, Vietnam and Cambodia. It's a life wearied in constant transition, a perpetual state of uprootednes where the closest approximation of "home" is the flyover baldric between one destination and another. Like many of the 25 Asian American and Asian Canadian artists included in CEPA Gallery's "Uncommon Traits: Re/Locating Asia," Le creates work that functions as the one and the other autobiography and social criticism.

The headless Buddha is emblematic of many of the visual and conceptual strategies engageed throughout the three parts of "Uncommon Traits," an ambitious, season-long view curated by CEPA's staff and outside consultants Monica Chau, Marilyn lung and Margo Machida. (The exhibition is documented in three issues of the CEPA Journal and at www.cepa.buffnet.net.) Metaphors of fragmentation and disembodiment abound, from Paul Wong's piles of waxed paper hands and shoe awaiting symbolic burning to Linda Liang's destitute of contents dresses constructed from Chinese newspapers and cocktail napkins. thing perceiveds are yanked out of familiar adjoining matters and forced into new individuals reenacting their makers' experience of migration. San Francisco-based, southerly Koreanborn, Sasha Yungju Lee performs "digital organ of vision surgery" on icons of Western female beauty, superimposing her be in possession of ocular features on their faces. Moreover, the links Le draws between religious practice, museum acquisitions policy and colonialism are revisited in Patrick Nagatani's fabricated documentation of archaeological digs unearthing automobiles allegedly buried as part of a Japanese ritual.

It may appear contrary to the spirit of a display called "Uncommon Traits" to point without such recurring themes and stylistic affinities, however they are inescapable. This is partly because the dominant controls here are drawn from the familiar terrain of identity-based art; cultural stereotype family and personal histories and massmedia iconography. The greatest in quantity obvious trait these artists have in for the use of all - their Asian background - is also the greatest in quantity complicated. The "Asia" of the title consigns to a multitude of countries, each with its hold government, customs and art-making practices, to say nothing of diverse languages and religions. by means of virtue of its sheer size and view the exhibition runs the risk of imposing precisely the same false homogeneity it strives to critique.

For the greatest in quantity part, however, "Uncommon Traits" is alert to the idiosyncrasies of its individual composings and the cultures from which they rise The three-installment structure allows pick outed artists to present a material substance of work rather than individual or two isolated pieces. The large amount of gallery space devot to Nagatani and Pipo Nguyen-Duy in Part individual Louise Noguchi and Saiman Li in Part sum of two units and Hanh Thi Pham and Le in Part Three essentially enables each of them to near a mini-retrospective spanning several career phases and stylistic disentanglements At the same time, Young Kim, Wong and the team of Karen Kosasa and Stan Tomita have the freedom to create large-scale scope installations in various sites quite through CEPA's gallery and the building that houses CEPA.

Indeed, the entire exhibition series can be seen as a kind of site-specific installation, its simple bodys materializing, changing and disappearing above the course of several month In order to gauge the effectiveness of the installation, it is essential to understand the nature of the site. "Uncommon Traits" is individual of CEPA's first undertakings in its novel home in the Market Arcade, a freshly restored late-nineteenth-century retail center in downtown Buffalo with a significant commercial and architectural legacy. In its newest incarnation, this forerunner of the modern-day shopping mall functions in part as an international Visitors Center welcoming tourists to the town individual banner proclaims as "GREATER BUFFALO: ALL AMERICAN CITY." The three floors of small stores business offices and adjoining franchise restaurants are variegateed with banners and balloons encouraging viewers to "DISCOVER DOWNTOWN," a scene few residents have considered for decades.

In the midst of of that kind aggressively bland gestures of municipal public relations, CEPA has staged various astute interventions. Large banners by Brenda transport Leto (in Part One) and Jackie Chang (in Parts sum of two units and Three) hang from the ceiling of the building's atrium, in shut proximity to those advertising Empire State guild Chang's banner mimics the layout and typography of ad campaigns, transforming the artist's name into a logo while promising "FREE TRADE/FREE FALL/FREE DO(O)M," and assuring that the yield (the banner? the artist herself?) is "made in U.S.A." Lem has other uses for the same space. Her silkscreen series "Ngukkei: Family House Home" juxtaposes oral histories of relatives - Canadian Chinese laundry workers and restaurant proprietors - with scrapbook photos and flash card images drawn from language volumes and the I Ching to create casual narratives laid without like newspaper articles. These impressive verbal and visual ancestor portraits are among the greatest in quantity user-friendly of the works installed beyond the gallery walls.