WILSHIRE CENTER

Liga Pang signs in at the joyous end of Expressionism with a show of big new paintings. Though some works advance a cautionary note--a pointed finger before a face in a two-panel painting called “Shhh,” an intimate couple seen through a window in “Freeing”--the tone is exultant. All bright, clear colors, loose brush work and juicy surfaces, these oils come at you like a celebration of painting.

They are more than that, for Pang brings her ethnic heritage with her. The child of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, she was born in Japan and has lived in the United States since she was 18. Her current figurative painting has grown from American Abstract Expressionism, but it retains ties to the Orient in its expansive sense of space and, occasionally, in symbols and facial features.

“Drowning in Culture” most clearly confronts us with the artist’s cross-cultural experience. Here a big face overlooks a coiled green dragon while fragments of an American flag and a sunset blaze in a turbulent background. “Shhh” seems to pair a plea for quiet with the cacophony of urban life, while “Visitors at Dawn” reads like a cosmic swimming hole for innocent skinny-dippers.

These thoughts surface slowly as cropped images of conflicting scale emerge from what appear to be abstract paintings but are really adroit collages of thoughts and experiences. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Jan. 6.)