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Clinch has done something remarkable in “Marley,” not merely offering a parergon to Dickens’s little masterpiece, imagining the soil out of which the action of “A Christmas Carol” grows, but creating a free-standing dystopian universe, a hideous vision of nascent capitalism in which nothing is real and every transaction is a fraud issuing from the brain of a master forger, who by the end has reduced even his own life, quite literally, to a trompe l’oeil.

“Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s,” at Blum & Poe.

This playful piece is a highlight of the large, two-part exhibition “Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s,” which also takes place at the L.A. gallery Nonaka-Hill.

The show is named for Gallery Parergon, a Tokyo space influential in the 1980s for supporting experimental art.

The research has been published in the journal Parergon.