by MATTHEW WOODLEY

So a palm reader and a journalist walk into a bar. The palm reader gets a Coke, the journalist a coffee, they sit down. "Sooooo," says the journalist, "tell me about myself."

"Could you please stick out your tongue," says Timothy Bryant, seven-year student of Chinese philosophy, Photoshop artist and working at "regular" status in the bohemian haunts of Mile-End.

I oblige, reluctantly, hands turned up on the table, unaware till then that my tongue would figure into all this. But I'm happy because he's already complimented me on my palm-meat factor - a sign of luck and vitality - and forecasted that I'll live into my 80s. I wonder if he knows I plan to spend my senior years drinking and shooting at people who trespass on my land.

Though maybe that wouldn't surprise Bryant, because he grew up partly in Texas. He's also been a Baptist church-goer in Tennessee, a cameraman in the thick of the WTO protests in Seattle, a Vancouverite and San Franciscan for a stint - plus, over those past half dozen years on the West Coast, a student of Chinese medic and Taoist master Dr. Xue Zhi Wang, for whom he produced a 16-minute instructional video.

"I'm all about being a black dog running from behind," Bryant says, living again in his birth city of Montreal for the first time in 25 years (he's 34). "This is what I've done since I was growing up. I'm always a stranger, always the new kid and whatnot - coming in from Texas, listening to Midnight Oil, listening to U2, while the rednecks are listening to Conway Twitty or whatever. So I've always been this opposite."

Opposites and balance of course figure prominently in Taoism, friend of the yin yang and the five elements. Those are notions Bryant reflects in his art, which he calls Pop Taoism. He dubs his newest series Negative Lotus: types like Hitler, Bin Laden, Lucifer, Manson, Bush Jr. and Margaret Thatcher positioned in various meditation poses. Evil meets harmony equals irony.

"It's based on what I perceive to be an unreality that's occurring," Bryant explains. "I don't know if it would be an easier life to do more surrealistic pieces based on the nuances of psychology, but there's a political thing happening and because I lived in the United States for so long and because I'm well read and because I saw the dumbing down of the nation - as an artist you have to do images that say what's really right in your life, what's strange or what's really really wrong."

Timothy Bryant's "All Fool's Day Vernissage" is on Friday, April 1, at Toc Toc (6091 Parc), 8 p.m.–late, $4 with proceeds going towards the artist's purchase of a button-making machine