The Arts in Santa Clara County, CA | Silicon Valley Open Studios

Painter Hongyun Suriwong (who shows in Mountain View the first weekend and in San Jose the second) has had a more literal experience of this struggle. Born and raised in China, Suriwong's artistic training forced her to be a perfectionist and a realist. "We used to be graded on how real our work looked," she recalls.

And then one day she met her future husband in a park in Shanghai, an American, and everything changed. In the beautifully romantic but sometimes painful whirlwind of change that brought her to marry and live in America, Suriwong stopped painting. Bombarded in her new home by the wide-open field of Western artistic styles, she wondered if she might have to abandon her career forever: "I started to question the nature of art. I've seen many things that would not pass as art in China be considered great art in the Western world." But finally, she picked up the brush again. "I started to let myself experiment with my brush strokes."

And four years later, Suriwong paints brides in traditional Asian costume. Her most recent of these colorful, evocative paintings, Lhasa Sunset, reflects her sense of romance around the culture of Tibet. "Tibet is like my dreamland. I have never been there, but I know that it is one of the few places on earth that is still pure."

Suriwong's traditional images are not something she brought from her homeland, where "white weddings" (with Western-style dress) are the norm, and the party line on Tibet casts it as a province of rebel clerics who live in opulence and sponge off the poor. Only in America did she see the films set in ancient Asian cultures that sparked her imagination and her current passion: to preserve the inspirational beauty of traditional cultures.

Suriwong experienced the traditional wedding for herself when she married in Thailand in a ceremony complete with elephants and nine monks to kneel and pray to. Like Coleman and Lewis, Suriwong found artistic freedom in the abstract. In her current in-progress painting (working title, The Red Veil), the vision of the veiled bride materializes through stabs of near-black ("Black in weddings is a bad thing") and deep reds (for good luck) like a ghost. "You can say that when I was learning to paint, I painted for my teachers, but now I create art for myself."