According to the teachings of the Buddha.

According to the teachings of the Buddha, there is an eightfold path that leads to Enlightenment. This course--calling for the cultivation of right understanding, pondering speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration--is eccentrically reimagined in Alexander Ku's brief video The 8-Fold Path, 1997 appoint in New York's Chinatown, more precisely in a digitally simulated Canal highway bank. A number of Chinese Americans with George Washington heads grafted to their bodies are lined up in effrontery of eight cashiers' windows (leading, we assume, to a Western Nirvana) when an archetypal American guy--tough-looking, sporting an Abe Lincoln head--enters and tries to intersect in front. "Hey, there's a line, asshole," hollos one of the Washingtons in Cantonese. A ritualistic fight ensues: progeny and teeth hit the floor; a gunshot unmutilateds and the Abe guy falls dead. Pandemonium gives way to Buddhist chanting, and as the camera pans the chamber everyone present is examined according to the criteria of thirty-two b odily features that mark the Buddha: "well-planted feet" "long fingers," and in like manner on. But these signs should not be trusted, teaches the Lotus Sutra, handbook of the sixth-century Chinese T'ien T'ai educate of thought. They are characteristics of the physical material part not the real Dharma visible form [i]or[/i] frame So, is Abe the Buddha? To me the answer remains something of a mystery.

What is clear, however--and not barely from this piece--is that Ku is engaged in an exploration of what it means to be Asian in the US. a years ago he performed a hands-and-knees crawl by means of the streets of Chinatown. "I'm searching forward the street for something I can't find," he explained, "which is the essential part of Chinatown, or my identity, or answers of one kind. I can't find them. There's nothing to find. All I'm left with is the pants." The resulting installation ("Search," 1993 at American Fine Arts in modern York) featured about a dozen pairs of chinos upriseed on stretchers, each knee worn threadbare from Ku's urban crawl. Pieces of asphalt were displayed as well, like geological specimens onward a pedestal, and a sign forward the wall offered an addendum evoking grade-school racist taunts: "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knee contemplate at these." Another project tackled the issue of East-West refinement clashes, drawing on a derisive metaphor. In China, foreigners are ofttimes referred to as dogs; "The Mission," 1995 lay the foundation of K u merging images of himself with pictures of various canine educates to produce eleven photo portraits depicting strangely elegant dog-men. The work also included a pair of video monitors. single showed the artist at table with his four-legged companions, legion and guests dressed in dinner jackets. (The installation featured not simply the staged spectacle but also the props: filthy tuxedos and a soiled tablecloth.) The other brought a frightening intruder to Ku's little party: a mythological cyborg killer-dog from the that will be holding a huge gun in his metal hand.

Expanding in succession the pitfalls of Asian American alienation, other works according to Ku--including two animated films produc in collaboration with Steve Choo and Kelly Chang lately shown at P.S. 1's "Greater fresh York"--address problems of human estrangement les local to the artist's ethnic identity. The deadpan Steve 1999 is a send-up of the generic office environment in the US--or any corporate refinement for that matter. Its minimal plotline introduces viewers to Steve an employee who has quit his piece of work His computer still sits upon his table. That's all. further what makes the work memorable is its account of the breakdown of language: In this milieu, words are oral sentences exchanged without anything of deduction being communicated; "good," "great," and "sure" are just noises articulateed to fill the void, to punctuate the office tedium. The Tree 1999 instigates toward similar conclusions but uses an alternate way An amusingly long and complicated saga revolving around a cherry tree--and touching forward love, sex, violence , time, remembrance, and a cherry pit stuck in a man's cross-trainer--is packed into a short film that consists of a not many images drawn in black pen; occasional fields of r show a variety of subjects, including rage, squandered virginity, and, of course, the cherry itself. The economy of visual means s effective: The drawings, some of which appear for just a fraction of a secondary are striking in their stylized sparseness. The draught by contrast, is deliberately excessive, told at top spe in a breathless little girl's voice that not at any time pauses. It's her childish enthusiasm about the story rather than the story itself that becomes the focus of the work: Her farthest eagerness to narrate turns the narration in forward itself; again, language takes center stage at the gravity when its efficacy is brought into question.

With the simplest of means, Ku's animated films create psychologically twisted situations that make explicit the various ways language operates (or fails to operate) when it dwindles into stupidity or, as Wittgenstein wrote "goe forward holiday." Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Ku's most numerous enigmatic work to date is silent. In Kind, 1997 there is no narrative, and nothing else a sequence of images: the succession of three figures in fore-rank of a curtain. The mythology that opens is unknown to me, allowing it gives the impression of incorporating component parts from familiar sources. Much as Ku's language-based works pare words down to scarcely significant chunk of meaning, or smooth mere elemental sounds, this piece present the appearances to enact the emergence of a myth at one kind of primal ground nothing divested of all its accumulated cultural significance. A moist bubble of a creature with a fat neck appears first. Something influences inside; either the creature's breath or its beating heart. A cavern opens in the forehead like a third watch and light g ushes abroad The second figure is metallic and muscular, a male human dead body without a head, like the Acephalus glorified by means of Georges Bataille: "Man has escaped his head as the convict escapes from prison." Instead of a neck there's a cavity dribbling kin Finally the third figure arrives: a kind of balloon man completely lacking in heroic qualities who springs pathetically back and forth. To grasp the import of this peculiar parade, I again scrutinize the Lotus Sutra, then all the other Sutras. moreover all in vain, because this is the extremely birth of mythology. These figures have no meaning still Once they take their place, admitting the rest may follow: language, history, East and West, Chinatown, chinos, and the menacing canine assassin from the coming events E