Doyle x 4, the first American exhibitions of Hong Kong-based visual artist and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, organized by the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (LACPS), will open in three major galleries in Los Angeles and will include a retrospective of the artist's ground-breaking cinematography at U.C.LA's Bridges Theatre. The exhibition is co-curated by Tania Martinez-Lemke and Roger Trilling of the LACPS.

This major survey of Doyle's exceptional imagery includes photography, text, collage, film and video, and premieres at New Alchemy's Still/Moving and LACPS in Hollywood on November 14th and at Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station on November 21st. A gala public reception for Doyle x 4 will be held November 21st at 8 PM at Track 16.

Track 16, whose Smart Art Press is co-publishing a book to go with the exhibitions, will present A Cloud in Trousers, the largest of the shows. Centered around four light-generated installations designed specifically for the space, this combination of texts, collage, and photography attests to Doyle's ongoing obsession with sex, light and mystery.

The Picture Is Up, an image and text-based collaboration between Doyle and film director Gus Van Sant, will be presented by the Still/Moving Gallery. The two just finished shooting Psycho for Universal, and this exhibit will reflect their experience working together-a first for Doyle- under Hollywood conditions.

The Universal Pigeon, the show at LACPS, summarizes Doyle's work, method and accidental philosophy. Two floors, one pristine and one a wreck, will be given over to stills, text, video and sound collage detailing Doyle's film work in China, the impetus behind it and its relation to American audiences.

Doyle's cinematography has won awards at numerous festivals, including Cannes and Hong Kong. To celebrate this aspect of his work, the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive, in conjunction with LACPS, will present a seven-feature retrospective, plus shorts and commercials, over five non-consecutive days in Los Angeles. Doyle will attend the Opening Night on November 14 to introduce the retrospective and participate in a post-screening discussion with the audience.

Trilling, who has also been working on Doyle's directorial debut, Away with Words, adds: "Chris' work is as much about energy as beauty, about spontaneity as about classical composition. He is insistently idiosyncratic, and as such presents himself only as an example of everybody's capacity to perceive and create their own truth and beauty. No mere stylist, he is a radical democrat of the eye."

Though new to American audiences, Doyle's work has shown in museums and galleries throughout Europe and especially in Asia where, as Du Ke Feng, he is a beloved pop-culture figure in his own right. The look he invented for such films as Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express have been endlessly imitated.

"It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Doyle's signature style-hand-held camera, short lenses, cropped compositions and saturated color-has as much defined the "look" of Chinese modernity, particularly urban Hong Kong, to the rest of the world, as it has been influenced by it," says Cheung Sim Lim, the archive's curator.