Some of the exuberant new paintings by Tomokazu Matsuyama, whose latest solo exhibition, "Come with Me," is now at Gallery Wendi Norris, recall the charged paradisiacal color and lands of enchantment dreamt up by master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.
Painted with an irrepressible youthful verve on discs and irregularly shaped canvases, boys gallivant on horseback, tropical birds take flight like origami party-favors come to roaring life, and celestial blue skies are overcome with stars. Influenced by ancient Japanese art of the Edo and Meiji eras, classical statuary, Renaissance painting, the presto-pow visual vocabulary of American pop culture, and a hybrid cultural upbringing in Japan and the U.S., the artist integrates an urban new world order and the historic past, blending Eastern and Western aesthetics with a dreamy hallucinatory energy. His paintings are complemented by steel sculptures forged in gold and silver. (Through May 2.)
For San Francisco literary icon and City Lights Books co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, words are not enough. Famous for being tried in the 1950s for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," the outspoken 96-year-old poet identified with the Beats has been passionately engaged with his lesser-known foray into visual art - painting, drawing, mixed media and prints - since the late 1940s in Paris, where he was pursuing a graduate degree at the Sorbonne. If not convinced, you can catch Legends of the Bay Area at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art before it closes on Sunday. The show of his paintings, supplemented by a dash of poetry and video, includes his first important work, which was reportedly inspired by the mischievous, openly bisexual Jean Cocteau. (Through April 5.)
Originally trained as an anthropologist, San Francisco photographer and media artist Doug Hall is on a roll this month with concurrent installations at two local venues. "The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described" (1987) at the San Francisco Art Institute, which hasn't been seen in the Bay Area since its premiere at SFMOMA in 1989, is a cross between mad science and storm-chaser footage on the Weather Channel. Not so much tripping the light fantastic as pursuing what Hall calls "the technological sublime," it features the high drama and unadulterated terror of the tumultuous, downright Biblical weather the planet has been experiencing. As a reminder of human frailty, it couldn't be more topical. The piece, featuring a three-channel, 17-minute video montage played via a half-dozen monitors and a projection, shows disastrous weather conditions - tornadoes, epic floods, rampaging wild fires, raging ocean storms - as well as industrial and power plants and other mammoth edifices we erect to harness and control forces of nature we're at the mercy of, despite our delusions to the contrary. Behind a metal-mesh fence resembling a prison barricade sits another component: a pair of austere, stiff-backed, imposing steel chairs that would be right at home in an execution chamber; intermittent bolts of lightning, emitted courtesy of a (Nikola) Tesla coil, jolt viewers whose attention may be wandering. But how could that be with a twister scarier than the one that catapulted Dorothy from Kansas to Oz? (Through June 6.) Though love may be a transaction that more often than not occurs within built environments, the jumping-off point for Hall's ironically titled "Love and Architecture" is a collection of photo-based works from 1991 as well as found and newly created images, all of which broadly play on the theme of obsessive love, in particular the brand of love characterized by a compulsion to fetishize objects and spaces that have come into intimate contact with a lover. (Rena Bransten Projects, through May 16.)
"Mind Traveling: Ink Art of Lu Chuntao" at the Chinese Cultural Foundation's Visual Art Center marks the first solo exhibition in the U.S. for the Shanghai-based artist Lu Chuntao, who transforms traditional Chinese ink paintings into a contemporary, sometimes abstract medium without sacrificing the ancient form's poetry or reverence for nature. The show's underlying concept, mind travel, is derived from a spiritual belief, rooted in Chinese art, that viewers could be magically transported to - and vicariously experience - the beauty and serenity of new places by entering the realm of a landscape painting. (Through April 11.)
And just for fun, in "Blow Up: Inflatable Contemporary Art" at the Bedford Gallery, one can find companionship with a pair of colossal fuchsia rabbits who really know how to fill up a room (Momoyo Torimitsu's "Somehow I Don't Feel Comfortable") or with Billie G. Lynn's spectral white elephant who lives up to its name. Lewis deSoto's statuesque and very gold "Paranirvana" blockades a gallery while taking a heavenly snooze on its side, and Guy Overfelt's "Smokey and the Bandit" Trans-Am muscle car offers a speedy getaway, but doesn't have a prayer of getting insurance. (April 26-June 21.)