Bertrand Mao was born in China, moved to the United States in 1965 and has long maintained a studio at VisArts. Lin-Lin Mao was born in Taiwan but grew up in suburban Maryland. Bertrand’s pictures of mountainous vistas and the “four gentleman” of foliage — bamboo, orchid, chrysanthemum and plum blossom — are loosely and delicately brushed in the customary manner. But where shanshui paintings are typically monochromatic, Bertrand supplements the usual grays and blacks with muted reds and greens. He also depicts sites far from China, such as an Alpine waterfall in Switzerland.

Three of Lin-Lin’s four contributions feature landscape paintings, but atop the daubed imagery are 3D trees twisted from gold or pinkish wire. These skeletal metal plantings — and also a fourth that’s free-standing — are loosely woven and adorned with berrylike baubles. The pictures beneath the wire sculptures are more akin to French impressionism than to shanshui, and overall, Lin-Lin’s work gives a more luxuriant impression than Bertrand’s.

Yet the starkness of Lin-Lin’s wire trees links her approach to the austerity of the traditional Chinese aesthetic, while the red roofs and green-haloed blossoms in Bertrand’s paintings gently rebel against it. Both artists take their own distinctive paths through mountains and water.

As is common in such pictures, Bertrand’s paintings incorporate Chinese calligraphy, whether just a few characters or an entire poem. Exhibited here is his text-only rendering of “Battle of Red Cliff,” an 11th-century account of a third-century clash (and one that inspired a 2008 John Woo historical epic movie). A simpler Chinese poem sparked Freda Lee-McCann’s “After Tradition,” a Studio Gallery show whose convention-bending artworks chop and reassemble bits of 16th-century writer Zhu Yun-ming’s ode to watching May cherry blossoms blow in the wind.

Lee-McCann is a local artist who was born in D.C. but grew up in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She often makes paintings that combine or contrast venerable Chinese styles with recent Western ones. “After Tradition” is divided principally between two series. One comprises craggy landscapes with Chinese characters lettered lightly atop them or written on scraps of paper collaged at random amid the vistas; the other consists of pure calligraphy in which characters in robust black strokes are superimposed over ones in gray, brown, orange or various intensities of blue.

In both sets, the characters are written loosely and often clipped around the edges, so they function foremost as abstract gestures. The verse is “not necessarily to be read by the viewers,” acknowledges the artist’s statement.

Like Bertrand Mao, Lee-McCann adds color to gray-based landscapes, although hers are a bit bolder and not always naturalistic. Towering rock faces can be accented in brown, green or lavender, while the brighter hues of the purely calligraphic works suggest pop art or commercial typography. In Zhu Yun-ming’s time, his calligraphy was considered extravagant and untraditional, qualities Lee-McCann appreciates. Ironically, her latest effort to modernize age-old shanshui style has a 16th-century precedent.

Downstairs at Studio are expressionist tree paintings by Cheryl Ann Bearss and photo-derived extended-family portraits by Deborah Addison Coburn; both shows contain evocative work by artists who exhibit regularly at Studio. Less expected is the nearby “Morocco: Colors and Shapes,” a set of small paintings by Joyce McCarten.

These pictures are abstractions that weren’t merely inspired by the High Atlas Mountains, but actually incorporate pinches of the arid landscape. McCarten took soil and rocks from dry river beds, pulverized the materials with a mortar and pestle, and combined the dust with acrylic medium. Painted on-site, the paintings juxtapose tans and near-black browns with vivid oranges. The compositions don’t literally depict, yet strongly suggest, the cliffs, rifts and outcroppings carved from rock over millennia. If these geological features can’t actually be seen in McCarten’s pictures, their presence is palpable.

Bertrand Mao and Lin-Lin Mao: Traditional and Contemporary Through June 14 at Concourse Gallery, VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville.

Freda Lee-McCann: After Tradition and Joyce McCarten: Morocco: Colors and Shapes Through June 17 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW.

Glass, photography, sculpture and representational painting are included in Martha Spak Gallery’s “Leading Women Artists,” but the show is dominated by abstract color pictures. Among the more prominent of the 17 contributors are Barbara Januszkiewicz, whose floral-like arrangements update mid-20th-century Washington color painting, and Anne Marchand, whose exuberantly fluid canvases rely on the glossy physicality of acrylic enamel pigment.

Shimmering hues and hard-edge forms characterize striking pieces by Alexandra Arata, Nina Mickelson and Alexandra Squire. The soft, watery oblongs of Arata’s paintings become taut and three-dimensional in a dynamic wall sculpture of multicolored, neatly overlapping wooden sticks, each one two-thirds coated in a single hue but with its lower section unpainted.

Mickelson arrays three large bars, separate but closely aligned, in red, orange and yellow; they’re topped with resin for a clean, shiny surface, but visible beneath the gleam are hundreds of submerged eccentric forms. Squire’s small pictures, each a boxy square on which two single-color fields are separated by a thin band, are also finished with resin to make them glow. Most of the color contrasts are dramatic, but one pairing effectively marries white with white. It’s a reminder that composition is as crucial as hue, even in color-field paintings.

Leading Women Artists Through June 11 at Martha Spak Gallery, 40 District Square SW.