Walking a tightrope between the nerdish and the savvy, Michael Arcega’s current exhibition at the de Young Museum maintains an amiably critical position. Its title, “Homing Pidgin,” immediately signals the artist’s penchant for puns, which he applies to hot-button topics like a kind of witty conceptual makeup. In this selection of sculptures, vinyl window treatments, and displays of objects borrowed from the museum’s notable Oceanian collection, Arcega cleverly turns artifacts into multilayered jokes. He takes aim, as in previous projects, at aspects of colonialism—in particular at the