When Dui Seid created Going to Seed (1976), the earliest work in this exhibition, he was not long out of art school. It belongs to the "Shaped Canvas" series that he, in fact, began while attending Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. Seid may have been young then, but his obsessive interest in the relationship of the flesh and the spirit was already fully formed. Since then he has stalked this theme like a boxer jabbing at a formidable opponent and expanded it to encompass related concerns about the relationship of the body to identity; the individual to the collective. A startlingly original and cohesive body of work is the result.

Going to Seed is a corner hugging, three-dimensional wall-work of canvas stretched over a wooden armature. Its sinuously curved, irregular shape suggests the stamen and pistil implied in the title; and--at a more abstract level--the womb like image radiating light seems the embodiment of organic fertility. Paint is sprayed and brushed with the tight precision of the traditional mandalas to which the artist says he was drawn. I'm reminded of Minimalist painting, Los Angeles-style; the spray-painted abstractions of artists like John McCracken and Peter Alexander that evoke the slick finish of cars and surfboards. Seid, who works close to his unconscious, says "I'm not usually aware of precisely what's influenced me. It's generally a blend of things I'm sometimes able to pick out in retrospect."

Put another way, Seid is highly attuned to the zeitgeist, the notion that certain ideas are "in the air." (The existence of the zeitgeist is art history's fundamental premise.) Going to Seed is a mystical restatement of the eternal inquiry into the meaning of existence evident in haunting Symbolist allegories such as Paul Gauguin's Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897) and Edvard Munch's Dance of Life (1899). A staple of post-Romantic art, this quest for eternal verities infiltrated popular culture in the late sixties and early seventies assuming forms ranging from music by the Beatles to movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The embryonic membrane evoked in Seid's work suggests the android imagery of Sci-Fi flicks, just as his later "Flesh Series" works are inflected with the technical flavor of cinematic special effects. Finally--and I've discussed Going to Seed at such length to suggest the complexity of Seid's project--there is the (possibly unconscious) irony of its title; "seed" and "Seid" being homonyms in English.

Where was Seid going (or coming from) during the second half of the seventies? The shaped canvases grew increasingly less hard-edged and more organic. Undulating three-dimensional grounds for paint, they became ever more flesh-like and hybrid, neither painting nor sculpture. The conceptual art-oriented seventies freed Seid from the constraints of a particular medium. Since then his idea-oriented art has proceeded from concept to physical realization as painting, construction, painted sculpture, installation and computer- or photographic print.

In personal terms, he had spent much of the seventies in Paris. In 1980 he moved back to New York. Why did he return? "I was tired of being a foreigner, I had to choose," he recalls. As with many other New York artists, Manhattan's concrete vastness helped inspire a return to apparently natural imagery. Although the natural world was implicit in works like Going to Seed, it was nature abstracted, nature as a transcendent vehicle of the spirit.

His new work presented a more literal view of nature. He produced glass-topped, wooden boxes filled with grasses and leaves that appeared to be perfectly preserved microcosms of North Eastern pasture or wetland. Seid's conceptual twist was his creation from paper of each blade of grass and every curling leaf. Despite their trompe l'oeil adherence to fact, the works represented a highly abstracted view of nature. (Note that the tiny leaf in the exhibited Wake (1984) precisely echoes the form of Going to Seed.) In retrospect, Seid recounts long-time interest in the Chinese carved ivory landscapes that he calls "concentric universes" and in the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. Seid was among the first artists in the eighties to utilize the diorama as source material to resonantly blur the distinction between nature and culture. Might the inhabitants of some future millennium regard the "diorama boxes" as a source of information about earthly flora from an earlier, homo sapiens era?

Death struck a close friend of Seid's in 1984. This first close-up encounter with mortality prompted a shift in the content of his art from the contemplation of the mystery of life, to the representation of death. Darkness now prevailed. A black box with a paper skeleton evokes an archaeological dig; a beach scene with a tide of blood red pollution suggests apocalypse here and now (Après Le Deluge (1984) and Playa del Fuego (1985) respectively.) They also embody Seid's shifting emotional state. The resigned contemplation of the early boxes was replaced by the seething anger that would characterize his next major body of work, the "Flesh Series."

Fueled by Seid's horror of the American government's mismanagement of the AIDS crisis, these new works--although still quite abstract--are far more socially engaged than the artist's previous output. The artistic indictment of the status quo is certainly nothing new in Western art of the past two centuries: Consider the pre-Napoleanic paintings of Jacques-Louis David, the art of Francisco de Goya, Pablo Picasso's Guernica, the graphics of Kathe Kollwitz, the murals of Diego Rivera, Dada art in its virtual entirety, et cetera ad infinitum. Modernism's demise and feminism's not unrelated re-emergence in the seventies made it safe for artists to again enter political waters.

The end of that decade saw a boom in politicized artmaking stimulated by the examples of Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, and Victor Burgin. They would be joined in the eighties by numerous artists including Barbara Kruger, Sue Coe, and a host of collectives like Group Material and Border Arts Workshop. Social inequities and environmental degradation were among the issues invoked. By the mid-eighties AIDS had hit the art world hard and artists--Ross Bleckner, Gilbert & George, Masami Teraoka, and Dui Seid among them--began to respond with AIDS-related work, both literal and metaphorical. Rejecting the precious scale of the "diorama boxes," Seid's "Flesh Series" works operate on the body-oriented scale of Abstract Expressionism and traditional realist sculpture. The earliest works in the series continued his use of paper (in this case papier-maché) to depict meat-like flesh; later he would turn to wax encaustic to fashion his increasingly grisly objects.

Physical Aid #2: Swinger (1986), the first "Flesh" piece, refers to party-goers fiddling while New York burned from the first onslaught of AIDS-related deaths. A ten feet long, lethal looking projectile--both hypodermic needle and weapon--is mounted within a free swinging, wooden circle, which Seid says was inspired by similar depictions of Shiva, the dancing god/goddess of death. Physical Aid #1: U-Brace Against the Door (1988) is a huge, triangular construction of flesh encrusted bones propping up a wooden panel that metaphorically invokes closed minds and defended psyches. At the time, Seid seemed to be waging an art assault on the collective denial that had transformed AIDS in the United States from a matter of public health, to a divisive and inhumane referendum on the morality of those afflicted with the syndrome.

In Seid's 1988 "Flesh" exhibition at the Souyun Yi Gallery in New York, both of the "Physical Aid" works were shown as well as smaller, less abrasive pieces such as Wound (1988). This encaustic wall-work offers a ruby pearlescent globe at the core of the damaged flesh. The artist says he wanted to show "the naturalness and beauty of a wound," a claim akin to painter Francis Bacon's intention to paint a screaming mouth "like a Monet sunset." The Grand Guignol mood of Seid's Soho show was also reminiscent of Bacon, the master of high pitched emotion communicated via images of raw meat. "I am not attempting to make sensational work," Seid wrote in a statement for that show. "But [to make] art that speaks powerfully of the vulnerability of the flesh which evokes our intimate knowledge of its suffering and mortality." Seid's rejection of spirituality and angry embrace of physical suffering strongly divided viewers.

But overshadowed by the "Physical Aid" works in the Souyun Yi show were more meditative pieces employing cool glass, rather than depicting hot flesh. In these multi-level abstractions such as Sky above, Earth Below (1987), various states of interpenetrating consciousness and temporal/spiritual reality are implied. The "Flesh Series" seemed to offer Seid a kind of catharsis that enabled him to nimbly move between anger and placidity, introspection and political confrontation. He has recently returned to the series, but with a bravura synthesis of hot and cool modes. Links (1991) comprises four half globes--two fleshy, two dotted with test tube stoppers--each pair connected by loopy, umbilical cord-like tubing. It is simultaneously an image of infection/treatment and, more abstractly, of mutual interdependence.

Disheartened by the continuing, inadequate response to the AIDS crisis, Seid in 1989 produced the most directly outspoken works of his career-the "AIDS Words Series." Each of the twelve text pieces proceeds from the vertically placed word "AIDS," crafted from medical waste encased in plastic. Four words emanate from the four letters a, i, d and s ("assist," "initiate," "donate," "support," to cite one example) and each piece is accompanied by a framed statement written by a person with AIDS or a caregiver. En masse, the series offers diverse meanings of--and responses to--AIDS, which run the gamut from bigotry to emotional support; and from disdain to political activism.

Totally unconventional--even by conceptualist, "words-on-the-wall" standards--the "AIDS Words Series" is also startlingly direct and didactic. These works couple the unthreatening literalness of text, with found-object, medical waste that many viewers will find disturbing. For this series, Seid has temporarily abandoned his use of art's usual vocabulary and methods to foreground his social concerns. "There was, and still is, a need for directness," Seid recently observed. To speak apparently unspeakable truths is one task of the contemporary artist; he is a witness.

As with the early "Flesh Series" works, the single-mindedness of the "AIDS Words" necessitated a total change. In the recent and resonant "DNA Series," Seid has coupled his concerns for the public and private, the biological and the metaphorical. Once again, the body is his point of departure. But this time it assumes the form of the literal (and invisible) coding of DNA, expressed through high tech means eminently suitable to the late twentieth century.

Seid began by commissioning a DNA "portrait" of himself. Culled from a blood sample, its ladder-like configuration is a Rohrshach blot test for our times. It is visible, but unreadable; reminiscent of starry skies and computer bar codes "read" at the supermarket check-out counter. DNA coding is a record of personal history, private yet objective. Seid attempted to evoke this objectivity in the digitized (computer generated) portraits of himself and his family that comprise the raw material of the portraits in this show. Three eerie works that Seid terms "reliquary boxes" offer a curvaceous glass wall of test tubes. Each is filled with paper fragments of digitized frontal views of its subject. We see Seid's mother and father photographed in their twenties, and a curious composite image of them that closely resembles the artist today. Easily readable from a few feet away, we see--up close--that DNA containing hair is affixed to some of the photo-fragments, blood smeared on others. The image of the child is surrounded by those of this parents. If this trio of portraits could talk, it would surely enquire, "Is biology destiny?"

The Freudian theme of biological determinism is questioned in Recombinant (1991), a six portrait ensemble of Seid and his parents. A pair of identical images of each parent--one more "blurry" (containing fewer pixels of image-information) than the other--are juxtaposed with two different images of the artist at four years old. As anyone who is a fraternal twin knows, the same genes may be differently configured. Expressed metaphorically, many of nature's "facts" remain a mystery to us.

Seid's most recent works pay witty--and abstract--homage to his three siblings and himself. Four large, translucent forms command the wall like the breasts of an ancient goddess or like cell membranes. The creamy, fiberglass "flesh" has been rendered immaterial by the light shining on and through it. Atop each a plate of glass and mirror casts shadows in DNA-coded patterns. The effect is life affirming and tonic; the inevitable death of Seid's parents implied in Off/Spring (1991) is complemented by this antic celebration of life and regeneration. Each generation literally "goes to seed" and one answer to the mysterious riddle of life is surely the instinctual urge for continuity.

Since the creation of Going to Seed over fifteen years ago, Dui Seid has come full circle. Life's philosophical meaning and biological method remain the central concerns of his art. The Chinese character for his name means "one on the great road." Of course the meaning of the "great road" is figurative, but sometimes we see that a great journey has been completed without ever leaving home.