A mile-high kung fu battle is the subject of the largest piece in Ying Yefu’s new solo show "So You Look Like You Got What it Takes" at Art Labor Gallery. One henchman has already been dispatched, his left leg sliced off at the thigh, as the protagonist confronts another, a robo-suited giant with the character for evil, 恶, written on his chest. Unlike your typical commercial airline, in this painting the tougher the bad guy, the further aft he sits, with the kingpin relaxing in the Dragon Hall, his shuang jie gun held casually in one hand. The Decisive Battle on China East Fairy Airline (2014) It took the Wuxi-born, Xi’an-based painter over a month to complete the 325 x 103cm work, which means that, despite the eerie timing of the show, “The Decisive Battle on China East Fairy Airline” (2014) was not inspired or influenced by the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Current events nevertheless imbue the piece with spookiness: a ghost flight — its unreality emphasized by the airline’s name and the strange combination of both propellor and jet engines — passing over what look like the corpses of track-suited Chinese high school students. In fact, Ying says those tracksuits are meant to evoke different incarnations of Bruce Lee, with the boss man’s yellow outfit taken directly from his unfinished performance in Game of Death (1973). In Ying’s painting the film becomes a more contemporary kind of game, where players die again and again but can always click retry. Asian Hero (2014) Ying’s chosen medium of ink brush on fibrous bast paper is much less forgiving than video games. There’s no painting over mistakes, as evidenced in “Asian Hero” (2014), or as Ying paints it, “Aisan Hero”. The misspelling is accidental — when I raised it with Ying at the show’s opening he was unaware of the error — but it may as well have been deliberate, a nod to the dubious English language translations of early kung fu films. The hero himself is depicted performing another kung fu trope, creating a sword-generated whirlwind with which to repel dozens of arrows, the way Jet Li does in Zhang Yimou’s film “Hero” (and Zhang wishes he could repel rumors about his supernumerary and extramarital children). Mahjong Corporation (2013) Ying has exhibited regularly at Art Labor since 2008, often drawing on nostalgic and traditional imagery taken from, for instance, schoolyard games and Chinese mythology. The medium itself is traditional, and the historic vibe is enhanced by a muted, seemingly faded color palette. Many of the characters in this series wear their hair in queues, the pony tail and shaved forehead imposed by the Manchus during the Qing Dynasty. Others wear old-fashioned Western clothes not seen here since the Republic of China (1912-1949). Wushu is the tradition that runs through this exhibition, but it’s mashed up with different themes in different art works. In “Mahjong Corporation”, we see the sort of 3-D cutaways found in geology textbooks. Swords at the ready, two of the gangsters maintain a ‘seated’ wushu pose, standing on one leg and leaning on the surface of the ocean, which doubles as the mahjong table, equally ready to play (打) or strike (打). Big Horse Instructionals (2014) Ying uses the lyrical names found in Chinese martial arts — including mentions of plants, animals, seasons and compass directions — to create oblique, confounding, wonderfully unusual relationships between wushu, games, weather systems and more. The semantic relationships are more connotational than logical, chosen almost the same way different colors and shades are selected to create an effect, rather than an argument. The Fatal Wind of Gossip (2014) This image of a chap in Western-style shoes, balls dangling as he farts a fatal jet of wind through his opponent’s chest, helps sum up Ying’s work. The meaning of this excellent, evocative art is like fart-transmitted gonorrhea of the eye, or an absurdly overworked metaphor: you really don’t need to get it. Ying Yefu’s “So You Look Like You Got What it Takes” continues at Art Labor Gallery through April 30.