Like a Magic Candle, Los Angeles's Chinatown Relights

Nobody ever thought much about Los Angeles’s Chinatown district until 1974, when Roman Polanski embedded it deep in the pop subconscious as a dark and mysterious region where normal rules do not apply. The mythology of Mr. Polanki’s “Chinatown” became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy for the area — first in the 1980s with the Los Angeles punk movement, which briefly found a home at Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Cafe, then more recently as the unlikely center of Los Angeles’s contemporary art scene.

Over the last decade, Chinatown became the surprise flashpoint of Los Angeles’s rise as an international art center, with what started out as a handful of D.I.Y. artist-run project spaces evolving into an art-world destination.

Drolly retaining the signage and original names of the dirt-cheap storefronts they commandeered, spaces like China Art Objects — a clubhouse gallery for students from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design — and Black Dragon Society — a hybrid of international arts hangout and showcase for U.C.L.A. undergraduates — opened in 1998 and soon found themselves at the center of a small cultural hurricane.

What was initially a piecemeal experiment in community building became a bohemian enclave. Cutting-edge performance artists staged happenings and smart collectors trolled to find future art stars at jumble sale prices. Soon well-heeled jet-setters from around the world began setting up shop and rents started to rise. At its peak, there were dozens of galleries: not just on the Chung King pedestrian street where the scene erupted, but sprawling across roughly 25 square blocks between Sunset Boulevard, Cesar Chavez Avenue and the Pasadena freeway. Some had satellite spaces in New York, Berlin, and beyond.

Of course that was all before. After the economic crash of 2008, galleries folded rapidly, leaving the community’s future in doubt. It has since become a commonplace to suggest that the Chinatown scene is dead, and that the Culver City district — where many of the most prosperous Chinatown alumni, including China Art Objects, have relocated — has taken over the mantle of Los Angeles’s cradle of creativity. But something beyond the scope of normal rules seems to be taking place.

Maybe it’s the result of canny Chinatown landlords dropping rents to pre-boom bargain prices, or the continuing momentum of a decade of heated activity, or just the fact that the neighborhood is one of the few pedestrian-friendly niches in Los Angeles, but a recent influx of young artists and new D.I.Y. spaces appears to be bringing Chinatown back to its roots as a vibrant, innovative underground. And this time around everyone already knows where to park and eat.

Although there are fewer blue-chip international showcases (the Black Dragon Society folded even before the crash, citing diminishing fun in the market-driven boom era) there are several anchors from the district’s previous incarnation. Two of the most idiosyncratic institutions — the Public School at Telic Arts Exchange on Chung King Road and the Mountain School of Arts in the Jorge Pardo-designed Mountain Bar in the Gin Ling Way Plaza (near the artists’ zine and vinyl shop Ooga Booga) — continue to offer quirky educational programming from plein-air painting in the distinctly un-pastoral Los Angeles River and an intensive study of the Japanese aesthetics of Ma to seminars on “sustainable articulture.”

The gallerist Thomas Solomon, an important figure in the early ’90s scene, has settled into a single space around the corner on Bernard Street, where he continues to display his consummate taste with shows like Analia Saban’s “Grayscale,” which runs through April 23. Taking over Mr. Solomon’s expansive former shared digs on Cottage Home Street (the new Chinatown scene has a distinct musical chairs theme) is the former Bernard Street collective Human Resources, which has an ambitious slate of performance and film-centered events lined up, including the debut of “Soley or: The Hidden People in the Shadowy Rocks” — a long-lost early 1980s Icelandic fantasy film — and a live performance of Terry Riley’s “In C” as a score for a choreographed ensemble of puppets.

One of Human Resources’s partners is Small Form Space, a nascent filmmaking collective that recently took over a live/work space on Chung King Road, which remains the heart of the Chinatown scene. In addition to their own screenings and exhibits, the collective is partnering with the neighboring Jancar Gallery to continue the “Perform! Now!” performance art festival that has electrified the scene for the last couple of summers.

Jancar Gallery had already established itself as an unusually focused, historically astute space, showing work by many overlooked, often female, mid-career artists, before its owner, Tom Jancar, moved to Chinatown (in the original Black Dragon Society space) in the summer of 2008. (Full disclosure: I had a small solo project there last October.) Since then, he’s expanded his mandate to include vintage conceptualist work by artists like Ilene Segalove and Rena Small, while continuing to support the work of quirky figurative painters, including upcoming shows of the local artist Charles Karubian and the great “Bad” painter Judith Linhares. In a few months, Mr. Jancar’s daughter, Ava Jancar, a San Francisco gallerist, will be closing her Mission Street space and moving operations to the second story of the complex.

Another new Chung King Road mainstay, open since the summer of 2007, is The Box, a gallery owned by Paul McCarthy and run by his daughter, Mara McCarthy, which shows often politically engaged art — a show of the provocative 1960s antiwar paintings of Judith Bernstein is running through May 14.

Typical of new emerging-artist-venues in the area is The Company, which moved a couple of months ago from the basement of a nearby apartment block into a centralized space that the curator Anat Ebgi describes as “the heart chakra of Chinatown.”

With its proximity to the Museum of Contemporary Art (as well as Disney Hall and other key Los Angeles destinations), its Hollywood picturesqueness (the neighborhood was built as a sort of tourist theme mall in 1938, after the original was leveled to enable building works by Union Station), and its wealth of dining options, Chinatown shouldn’t need to do much to keep a finger in the art world pie. People have been declaring the death of this scene every couple of years for the last decade, to the point where the best response seems to be to flip the noirish resignation of J.J. Gittes, the protagonist of Mr. Polanski’s film, back on itself, and say, with quixotic optimism: “Forget it, Jake — It’s Chinatown.”