Pop appropriation meets eroticism in the work of Liu Ye and Kyung Jeon. These artists remind us of the consistent presence of sexuality throughout the history of Pan-Asian art. Along with Chie Fueki’s large, busy, and heavily textured paintings of psychedelically decorated athletes in cubistic action poses currently on display at Mary Boone, these artists are linked by their use of allegory.

Liu Ye appropriates the image of Dick Bruna’s Miffy, a girl rabbit character, in five of the paintings at Sperone Westwater. My 3-year-old son identified Miffy before I did when we were flipping through the catalog. It indicates that Mr. Ye was drawn into the world of art when he read classic fairy tale collections by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen as a boy. But his work attempts to replace the clear-cut moral dichotomies present in those tales with an art world staple, ambiguity.

In paintings such as “Boogie Woogie, Little Girl in New York” (2005) and “Once Upon a Time in Broadway” (2006), he appropriates Mondrian’s compositions. Do the delicately painted Miffy, the abstract figure of a stocky little girl, and Mondrian’s rectangles add up to a larger meaning? It is hard to say, but it is clear that Mr. Ye is trying to tell a story, a narrative (“Once upon a time … “) filled with opaque symbols.

Mr. Ye repeatedly uses two female figures, both with disproportionately large heads. The little girl looks like she is carved out of a block of wood, while the pubescent female character relates directly to the female characters found in Pan-Asian cartoons and animation. The girl’s green skirt, red bowtie in the hair, and bowl-shaped hairdo are cultural signs of a sort. One could also say the fetishized curves and selective anatomical details of the teenager’s comically tapered forms are symbolic as well, in that they are signifiers of sexuality, ideas not reality. The egg-shaped heads on these caricatures and the long distance between their eyes and eyelashes makes them dolllike and alien. The distortions Mr. Ye employs when making these figures makes them feel less like individuals and more like types — yet another way that Mr. Ye borrows from allegory.

“Sword” (2001) is the most powerful painting in the exhibition. Two uniformed girl characters face one another with swords drawn on opposite sides of a dreamy, spatially ambiguous landscape. Except for the fact that the tears rolling down their cheeks are shaped differently from one another they are mirror images. Does this stand-off represent the divided self, the history of Ye’s birthplace China, or a perpetual conflict of universal forces? Mr. Ye borrows the heavy symbolism of allegory in this painting, without providing the clear cut moral vision found in an allegory such as “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Kyung Jeon, whose work is on view at the Proposition gallery, does delicate and technically impressive gouache and graphite compositions on rice paper, which consist of multi-figure action or battle scenes. These images recall the sort of life and death struggles that Hieronymus Bosch illustrated, but their playfulness is more reminiscent of the marginalia with which Sergio Aragonés filled the pages of Mad Magazine. Although the poses and actions of the figures in these paintings could represent different things — the battle of the sexes (“Joust Fight” [2006]), the life stages of woman (“On Motherhood” [2005]), and male sexuality (“Peek” [2005]), among others — they exude the lightness of an idyll but deal with serious stuff like sex, birth, and death.They are beautifully rendered microcosms populated by childlike brunette figures. Whether a woman is using her animated breasts to threaten the people around her or a group of disgruntled looking cartoon males are poking their faces out of a giantesses’ extraordinarily long train of straight black hair, Mr. Jeon imagines the sexes at war. In his world, humans blend with the animal realm in an emotional and literal sense. The figures don’t have an individual character, and it is hard not to read them as symbolic types.

Chie Fueki’s mixed media paintings are chock full of emblems from sporting teams, predominantly football team imagery such as dolphins, cartoon lightning bolts, attacking eagles, and numbered jerseys. Although the competition between the fractured surfaces, varying textures, myriad colors, and plethora of outlines often undermines the complexity of these compositions, Ms. Fueki’s symbolic overload is definitely of the moment. Ms. Fueki incorporates sports imagery into her work, which is rare in the art world. In the Blakean “Significant Moment” (2005–06), a football player descends from the heavens with rainbow colored spirals swirling all around him. In “Every Corner Runs Two Directions” (2006), the most challenging painting in the exhibition, sports team emblems and football players’ body parts spread across the surface along with numerous asymmetrical geometric patterns. Delicate patterning, complicated color schemes, meticulously crafted surface effects, and signs and symbols relating to sports — at times this makes for a new and mysterious world.

Ye until October 28 (415 W. 13th St., between Ninth Avenue and Washington Street, 212-999-7337);

Jeon until October 28 (559 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-0035);

Fueki until October 21 (541 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-752-2929).