Minoru Yokoyama’s Tables for One

There’s a photo of Japanese designer Minoru Yokoyama on the cover of the little catalog produced by Orange Coast College Art Gallery, where some of his work is on view. Wearing under a traditional robe a T-shirt with a Japanese inscription , he poses--arms folded, expressionless, like some latter-day shogun--behind one of the wood, glass and granite tables he designed.

Yokoyama’s sleekly engineered tables and other objects are based on the centuries-old woodworking technique of tongue-and-groove joinery. So far, so good.

But he also fancies himself a philosopher of sorts. Texts scattered throughout the exhibition and in the catalog explain his use of aspects of traditional Japanese design as a means of invoking traditional values. Make that patriarchal values.

In a catalog preface, Yokoyama says his designs are “a political statement” and that he is “an educator” who uses joinery “as a tool to explain relationships.”

Yoking polished pieces of wood together without nails by means of what he thinks of as “female” notches and “male” protrusions, Yokoyama creates slender towers. One (“Minonomi Pillar”) is a self-contained column. Others pop up in the centers of his glass-topped tables, where, we learn, “wedges, representing the male, help the horizontal female joinery to hold the glass.”

The towers are based on the central pillar in the traditional Japanese house, a symbol of “the strong, leading role of man in the family,” writes gallery director Irini Vallera-Rickerson. “According to Minoru, modern Japanese society has lost this important . . . relationship.”

Important? Not for anyone who believes in the equal partnership of the woman of the house.

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Yokoyama rails at the sterility of modern life (“We live surrounded by concrete.”) and offers platitudes about his “mission to reconsider basic values.”

You begin to wish he would just stick to making attractive furniture.

The tables are produced in dual heights (low, for Japanese diners sitting on floor mats, and high, to accommodate Westerners’ chairs). Viewed purely as design, rather than as philosophy in 3-D, these pieces have the generic modernist appeal of elemental materials, simply combined.

Whether you agree with his characterization of light-colored Japanese cherry wood as “female” and dark American walnut as “male,” the pairing of the two woods is attractive.

Vallera-Rickerson and her architect husband, Robert Rickerson, worked with Yokoyama to transform the gallery into a lovely showcase, with Japanese characters brushed on the pale green walls, a long swath of rice paper on which the shadow of “Minonomi Pillar” falls and floor pillows where viewers may sit.

But it seems quite a stretch to call this very personal show “Spirit of Japan: Light, Shadow, Detail,” as if this designer were somehow the representative of all that is truly Japanese.

In one of those bicultural quirks that typify our age, Yokoyama--the grandson of a carpenter in the Japanese emperor’s court--became interested in traditional Japanese carpentry while studying design in New York in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

For some reason, he appears to have turned his back on the free-thinking, spirited, multicultural mix of attitudes in his host city. Having retreated to a set of rigid notions hallowed by his cultural history, he seems hard put to find unhackneyed ways of expressing them.

One piece--dramatically lighted and framed by a circular cutout representing the rising sun motif on the Japanese flag--functions purely as didactic art. Within a circle on the wall, a cluster of wooden pieces juts out horizontally, signifying “the people of the Earth.” Alongside it, a single piece of wood inside a half-circle “moon” represents “a lonely man.”

Who is this lonely man? Could it be Yokoyama himself? He hints at this interpretation in a wooden puzzle game. Designed with “male” and “female” interlocking parts, it allows the person with the most “married” pieces to win.

Whoever draws the one wooden piece that doesn’t fit with the others automatically loses the game. Curiously, as if declaring himself outside the happy sphere of male-female relations, Yokoyama has put his own logo on this piece.

* “The Spirit of Japan: Light, Shadow, Detail,” Orange Coast College Art Gallery, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Wednesday, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. and 7-8:30 p.m. Thursday. Free. Through April 14. (949) 432-5039.