Archaeology and topography come together at San Francisco's M. H. de Young Museum this month in a pair of shows that explore Asian American art.

"Asian/American/Modern: Shifting Currents 1900-1970" examines the culture and rich history of works made by artists of Asian heritage in this country during the modernist period. "Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes" presents the topology of hills and waterways as seen by a leading contemporary Asian American artist.

Lin, who is most famous for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., has become one of the United States' most acclaimed public artists. Her concern for the environment informs her exhibition of three installations and supporting works that relate to endangered bodies of water and mountain ranges.

Offering ways to meditate on the landscape and our relation to it, she has built a 10-foot-high hill made of 60,000 two-by-fours in the museum's Wilsey Court. It's a beautifully undulant form whose cheap materials become quite gorgeous in her hands. Similarly, one marvels at the beauty of a small-scale mountain range she has constructed in a smaller gallery on the museum's lower level.

The labyrinthine density of the mountain range is offset by the open network of aluminum that forms an underwater view of Bouvet Island in the Antarctic in another small gallery. Other waterways she has addressed include the Tuolumne River, here made of innumerable nails pounded into the wall, and the Black Sea, Dead Sea and Red Sea made of wood that is carved to reveal the depths of the waters made solid.

The exhibition is rounded out by smaller pieces including topographical atlases cut out to reveal the layers of sediment that make up land and water forms. The exhibition coincides with the unveiling of an outdoor sculpture by Lin at the newly opened California Academy of Sciences across the concourse from the de Young.

The tightly focused Lin show offers a contrast with the sprawling exhibition of works by Asian American artists that occupies the bulk of the museum's special exhibition space. Moving from Toshio Aoki's turn-of-the-20th century depiction of a "thunder spirit" banging his drums noisily to the innovative 1960s video works of Nam June Paik, "Asian/American/ Modern" looks both east and west, examining the visions of cross- cultural artists. While there are works, such as Aoki's, which is based on Japanese temple statuary, more often the synthesis these artists have achieved leans on Western influences and styles such as cubism, social realism and abstract expressionism.

Yun Gee's "Where Is My Mother," 1926-27, blends cubist and expressionist influences to depict an emotionally charged image of an immigrant far from home. Drawing on the same sources, Miki Hayakawa's "Sleeping Man" is informed by the cubism of Paul Cezanne and the emotive color of Franz Marc.

In "My Papa," 1943, Henry Sugimoto draws on the conventions of social realism in depicting the emotional turmoil of the internment during World War II that disrupted the lives of so many Japanese Americans. It is one of a number of moving works that explore the travails of camp life.

George Matsusaburo Hibi offers a cold winter scene of an internment camp in Topaz, Utah, that transcends style, giving us a chilling idea of the loneliness and hardship Japanese internees experienced there. Interestingly, Mine Okubo shows the same encampment in the throes of a desert dust storm swirling around thick, rounded figures wrapping themselves into a ball to withstand the harsh wind.

The experience of the immigrant and the internee informs much of the exhibition, which is as important historically as aesthetically. Images like Hisako Hibi's red and black vision of a woman bending to pick up a huge piece of coal to warm her family's barracks or Dan Harada's deserted scene of barracks at Tule Lake Segregation Center carry an emotional weight that gives them even now a sense of urgency.

Both images were done in 1944, close to the end of the war. By 1948, Hisako Hibi had turned to a surreal abstraction in which she appears as a small figure caught up in a maelstrom of external forces, guarding her two children after the death of her husband, George.