A biker in Bangkok, Thailand, returns the gaze of photographer Doug DuBois. Click photo for larger image. "East/West Encounter: Photographs by Doug DuBois and Soon-Mi Yoo" Where: Silver Eye Center for Photography, 1015 East Carson St., South Side. When:Through April 17. Noon to 5 p.m. Wed.-Sat. and until 9 p.m. Thurs Info:412-431-1810 or visit www.silvereye.org "The Vigil" Where: Pittsburgh Filmmakers, 477 Melwood Ave., North Oakland When:Through April 4. 3 to 8 p.m. Mon.-Fri Info:412-681-5449

American photographer Doug DuBois would stand poised on a steamy, crowded Bangkok sidewalk waiting for the traffic light to turn red. Then he'd dash into the congested stream of buses and cars to a stopped motor bike, straddle its front wheel and photograph the unsuspecting rider, springing back to safety when the light changed to the applause of watching street vendors.

And now you're facing down those same bikers, albeit through the sanitized space of a photograph. The experience is still pretty impressive. The teeming color and slightly larger-than-life scale of the images convey intimacy, and you feel the tension that results from invading someone's personal space.

Eight of these images from DuBois' "motorsai" (bike riders) series streak down a wall of Silver Eye Center for Photography, which wisely hung them at eye (or meet-the-gaze) level.

Across the gallery, in like composition and presentation, are photographs from his "parade" series of high school students who'd marched in a St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City. Each posed for the camera, and the contrast between the straight-shouldered, slightly self-conscious teens who'd been participating in a formalized ritual and the casual postures of the working-day bikers is only one of the comparisons invited by juxtaposing the two sets of photographs.

By creating series, DuBois "explores the commonality of a particular group," a gallery label explains. By grouping, he also calls attention to how easily stereotypes develop: seduction by superficial qualities. Get past the mode of transportation and the uniform, and it's evident that multiples of class, race and personality are represented in each arbitrarily designated group.

The effect of mass media, cultural fusion and globalization on our consciousness is also called to mind. The bikers -- helmeted and wearing Western clothing sporting English-language labels and images like the cartoon character Bullwinkle -- could be found as easily in Manhattan as in Thailand's capital. Likewise, it would be difficult to assign a regional distinction to the young marchers; or even, perhaps, a country.

DuBois' work is half of the exhibition "East/West Encounter: Photographs by Doug DuBois and Soon-Mi Yoo." Each artist is concerned with perceptions of the "Other" in an increasingly shrinking world.

Korean-born Yoo addresses stereotyping of Asian women in "seeking saf (single Asian female)," the work here excerpted from a larger installation. She makes her point straightforwardly, with vintage photographs of Asian women and contemporary images of white American men mounted upon textured wallpaper printed with singles ads specifying an Asian woman. The men were actual respondents.

A self-portrait as geisha introduces another layer -- the historic animosity between Korea and Japan -- a theme also developed as a subtext on the wallpaper.

An engaging, short 1999 video, "Faith," is Yoo's most successful component, due in no small part to its aesthetics and compelling subject matter. But it also gains from focus. It's evident that Yoo has much to say. Giving each issue its own space will ultimately make a greater impact.

Less heralded are the small exhibitions in the Members Gallery, which frequently displays polished work. Nature is John Karian's subject, often moody and swathed in fog. Of particular note are "Allegheny River, Clearing Storm at Dawn" and "Frosty Cattails at Sunrise." Paula Durbin elevates botanical imagery from beautiful to lush through the Fresson printing process, carried out by descendents of its developer in a French atelier and available only to selected clients. A trio of "Pomegranates," their ripe orange skins splitting, is especially corporeal.

DuBois is also exhibiting, at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, "The Vigil," a haunting video installation about the death of his grandmother, who lived out her more than nine decades in a small Western Pennsylvania mining town.

A succinct tripartite work on three screens that surround the viewer, the camera first moves in close, both revealing and caressing her deeply lined face. She's shown as vital at her 92nd birthday party. And then there is an abstracted white landscape that reveals itself as a hospital blanket in rhythmic rise and fall overlain by the sounds of labored breathing.

You root for her to win and you know that she can't. At the last, three waxy-looking fingers, inert upon the white void of bedding, fill the huge screen.

Expanding the central realistic part of the video would increase empathy for DuBois' grandmother -- framed by the abstract visual metaphors for aging and dying -- and perhaps draw the viewer more fully into the final scene. In any event, "Vigil," both blunt and poetic, addresses an important subject that's often sanitized and hidden in our society. It bears witness to what we cannot bear.

"East/West Encounter: Photographs by Doug DuBois and Soon-Mi Yoo"