UNTIL SURPRISINGLY RECENTLY, conventional wisdom held that anything from the East that resembled contemporary work produced in the West was derivative, and yet anything that didn’t resemble work produced in the West was unsophisticated and naive. Alexandra Munroe’s “Scream Against the Sky: Japanese Art After 1945,” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1994, was one of the first major museum shows in New York to correct that perception. Even the New York Times expressed wonderment that “[a]nyone who regards contemporary Japanese art as a watered-down version of Western modernism has a surprise

TENEMENT FILMS (3 MINUTE WONDERS), 2009, the opening presentation of Luke Fowler’s solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, comprises four 16-mm shorts, screened here one to a wall. Each work records the apartment of one of the artist’s neighbors. Helen is a flurry of erratic shots, quick cuts, and multiple exposures. In the relatively static conclusion to David, the camera points outside: David’s possessions ultimately tell us less about him, Fowler implies, than this open window, this view of Glasgow’s pedestrians, its streets. In the moodily lit Anna, a young woman is glimpsed in reflection,