Artist Liga Pang tapped her well-worn American cowboy boots and pointed to the beautiful tunic she was wearing, which she had fashioned from the fabric of antique Japanese kimonos.
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“With cowboy boots, it’s me,” she said. “I am a mixture of these.” The installations at Rice Gallery this winter, by Pang and Lee Mingwei, showcased the work of two Asian American artists who interlace disparate cultural influences in their work as well as in their identities.

On view from November 9 to December 9, 2001, Pang’s installation, Ikasu, infused the gallery with the tranquility of the natural world. Ikasu is a Japanese word that means “to give life to,” and Pang’s room-sized sculptural form did just that.

Composed of a delicate mesh of dead, brittle bamboo twigs, the exquisitely contoured structure was flexible but strong, fragile but sturdy. Pang and four assistants worked full time for an entire month to painstakingly weave the delicate curtain of bamboo.

Currently residing in Japan, Pang teaches master classes at the prestigious Sogetsu School of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. Though her work departs radically from the formal rules of this ancient art, it retains ikebana’s spare elegance and acute sensitivity to the natural world. Pang stresses a method of respecting and listening to natural materials that she calls “collaboration with nature.” She says she takes “great energy from just walking, just observing” nature in the woods and hills and on the beach near her home in Hayamacho, Japan. “I wanted to do something, some work that gives the same kind of feeling” to viewers of Ikasu, she says. “I felt I wanted to move people, to provide something nourishing to the soul.”

Pang’s work is informed by her intimate experience of several cultures. She was born in 1939 in Japan to Chinese parents and, as a headstrong teenager, moved to California by herself without even a working knowledge of English. Pang remained in the United States and pursued a successful career in painting until moving back to Japan in the late 1980s. Her consummate ease in moving between cultures is marked as much by her fluency in English, Chinese, and Japanese as it is by her eclectic personal style.

A beautiful web also figured centrally in Lee Mingwei’s installation, The Tourist Project, on view January 17 to February 24, 2002. In Lee’s case, however, the web was an intangible network of personal connections and interactions. The Tourist Project reached far beyond the confines of the gallery space as Lee discovered the city of Houston through its residents’ eyes. Twenty participants volunteering as “tour guides” introduced Lee to locations in the city that were personally meaningful to them. In this fun, poignant process of sharing stories and memories, the city came to be defined by the personal histories that have unfolded within it.

Traveling by car, bike, and canoe and on foot, Lee’s tour guides shared knowledge of the city—and in many cases, its Tex-Mex food and offbeat shopping—that he might never have encountered as an ordinary tourist. While some of the tours were festive and playful, others were more harrowing. For instance, one guide brought Lee to the clinic where she first tested positive for HIV.

Exhibition furniture in the gallery space displayed mementos of the trips Lee took with his guides. Photographic projections, collected objects, recordings of conversation, and pieces of clothing provided evocative testimony to the artist’s excursions.

The Tourist Project is the latest in a series of interactive projects by Lee that have dissolved the conventional boundaries between everyday encounters and the realm of art. In The Dining Project, displayed in 1998 at the Whitney Museum, Lee prepared elaborate Asian meals for one museum visitor each evening after the museum had closed.

Lee was raised in Taiwan and the United States and spent six childhood summers in a Ch’an Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. Buddhist influences can be seen in the contemplative tone of his works, as well as in their quiet insistence on the significance of being fully present to oneself and others while carrying out ordinary activities. Currently residing in New York City, Lee describes his artistic orientation as bridging two sensibilities: “I bring both a knowledge of the modern world and a habit of almost monastic simplicity, practicality, and cooperation to my work.”

—Maria Stalford