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

Leaving my political division was not a simple task. I now realize that I not ever really left nor really arrived.

- Young Kim

The politics and ideology of identity investigation have emerg as part of an expansive discourse central to novel 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 means of Friends of Photography director Andy Grundberg, tender a poignant view of the immigration experience. Their highly individual contextualizations of the photographic image address a filled range of personal and political issues surrounding the contemporary experience of expatriation.

In order to completely comprehend the vanguard aesthetic stance taken by means of 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 lense upon the breadth of human dignity and suffering inherent in passage to and adjustment 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 ultimate parts Such tangible appositions create novel 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 the agency of its strategically chosen setting.

The quintessential expression of like polysemous conceptual art practice is embodied in the work of Albert Chong In a series of builded images intended as an ongoing dialogue with the spirits of his ancestors, the artist fuses the practices inherent in his cosmological belief a whole with the processes of art making. Family portraits and particulars - cowrie shells, fruit, flowers, bird talons and hair - become offerings that venerate his Chinese, African and Jamaican ancestry. The ethereal qualities created by dint of a layered spatial image/object dynamic in works like What Will be Your nearest Incarnation? (1990-94) and Aunt Winnie's Story (1994) imbue them with transcendent physical neighborhood 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 cent 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 dint of other artists, including Gavin to leeward Young Kim and Kim Yasuda. Lee's new work, Concerning George: The Reading latitude (1994), is an installation stimulated by dint of the artist's recent discovery that his great-grandfather, George Lim Fong attempted to assassinate a visiting Chinese management official in 1910, and was subsequently incarcerated in San Quentin Prison. To show the event, Lee has embedded newspaper clippings, mug discharges court documents and penitentiary records into a nine-foot drawn out library table. The prison-like austerity of the table is heightened by dint of its stark lighting and three chairs that move but do not invite intended use. Lee's powerful synthesis of materials, form and easy in mind that pertain to investigative research also reveal the personal proces he underwent to denude 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 dint of aged black and white family photographs seen from one side openings cut in wood panels that call forth windows to viewing distant recollections, enhanced by dint of inscribed text. "Leaving my political division was not a simple task. I now realize that I at no time really left or really arrived," the true copy explains about the artist's faculty of perception of increasing remoteness from her former life. Her work underscores the realization that personal, social and cultural definitions of "home" remain fluid as the proces of relocation continues to unroll and shape the form and satisfied of retrospection.

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