THE SITES ARE FAMILIAR — the Eiffel Tower, Pisa’s campanile, the Hollywood sign, the old World Trade Center towers shot from below — and the images appear like shots of a solitary tourist; his fist grasps the cable release. But his profile is solemn: a sharp jawline, chin raised and jutted, tinted sunglasses that appear more fogged-over than tinted, hair sheared short, perhaps by an electric razor. He wears a gray Mao jacket with glinting buttons, the old uniform of the Communist Party of China. He is an ambassador or a poseur, a visitor out of time and place, his manner ruthlessly aloof, his impression of his surroundings comically unreadable. He visits Disneyland and requests photos with Goofy and Mickey, who bend and mug as he stands upright with customary self-protecting stiffness. The pictures parody stereotypes of Asian inwardness, and they rebuke Western portraiture, which purports to disclose the inner lives of the subject. In these works, nothing about the person, though much about the world, is revealed.

Compare these shots, from Tseng Kwong Chi’s “East Meets West” a.k.a. “Expeditionary” series (1979-89), to paintings by Martin Wong, his contemporary, who lived on the devastated Lower East Side, not far from Tseng’s East Village. Wong’s works are as outré as Tseng’s are hermetic, landscapes that obscure the painter and take in the men — usually men, mostly Latino — behind the grimed facades of Manhattan’s then-frayed edges. This is the imagery of Wong’s neighborhood: Storefronts featuring Chinese characters and Spanish; the variegated concrete of prison cells that form the backdrop for a Renaissance-style annunciation; an elegy for a handball court; a paean to the “hickory smoked rubber and B.O.” scent, as the artist once described it, of firemen coming back from work; and above all, expanses of brick, each slab and joint individuated. “Heaven” (1988) is a circle of brick with a hole at the center: a Chinese bi form and maybe, as some critics read it, a glory hole. Though Chinatown was just around the corner, Wong was a rare Asian resident on the Lower East Side, and he became integral to it, one of the surest and most steady documentarians of its cracked mood. One scholar has compared his work to the glory days of Dutch realist art. In the end, he said, he was working in the much longer and deeper tradition of Chinese landscape painting.