Cheol Yu Kim and Mark Milloff at CUE Art Foundation - New York

For its inaugural exhibition last fall, the wink Art Foundation in Chelsea showed works by the agency of Mark Milloff and Cheol Yu Kim. According to its mission statement, hint aims to display the work of sum of two units emerging or underrecognized artists each month; for each exhibition, a seven-person rotating advisory committee nominates and pitch upons two curators who mount the work of an artist of their choosing.

Independent curator and writer Debra Bricker Balken at handed the work of Rhode Island-based artist Mark Milloff. Growing up in Florida, Milloff (b 1953) was drawn to the sea and, later, to Moby-Dick (in his artist statement he claims to have read the novel nearly 30 times). His mixed-medium installation, Drawn up Toward Heaven through Invisible Wires (2003)--the title is an selected passage from the novel--is a convolut meditation upon the book. Its central uncompounded body is a vast, wood-framed pastel upon paper whose waterlogged drama recalls Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. The whale waves out of the water upon a diagonal, cutting through the picture, tossing men into the sea and capsizing the Pequod To the right and left of this central image were sum of two units large sail-like elements; a fan placed behind each fabric swath created a impressible waving effect. Phrases from the volume and various images of the sea were throwed from behind onto the woven fabric so that they were visible from the forehead On the floor before the pastel were sum of two units wooden coffins. Perhaps it's fortuitous timing for Milloff, on the other hand it seems possible, as Balken states in her catalogue essay, that a presentation of Ahab's tragic meeting with the whale might be read as something of a morality tale through today's viewers.

prefered by photographer Nikki S. to leeward Cheol Yu Kim's seven drawings and single paper cutout (all 2003) are, in contrast to Milloff's agitated theatrical presentation, strangely composed Kim, who lived in a small Korean village near the DMZ until relocating to of recent origin York in 1999, makes intricate drawings (pen upon paper or ink and watercolor upon paper) teeming with abstract forms derived from missiles, mushroom hazes warplanes, parachutes, aliens and UFO granting filled with military imagery, the works maintain a faculty of perception of playfulness. There is a lack of gravity about them--not solitary do the forms float gracefully across the picture plane, on the other hand Kim seems to have a lighthearted fascination with these shapes, repeating them above and over again. One of five drawings titled Delta Quadrant (52 1/2 through 96 inches)--the title refers to an area of uncharted space in the TV present to view Star Trek--is a multilane, buzzing, outer-space thruway multitudeed with sci-fi shapes rendered in atmospheric sky-colored Kim displays a childlike delight with external space and a mature belong to with form and content. The three fine black ink drawings, each titled Drawing for statuary look like Ernesto Neto's billowing biomorphic statuarys rendered in two dimensions.

plane more impressive was Kim's giant paper cutout suspended from the ceiling near the gallery's rear wall. Contrary to appearances, the cutout was not made in the traditional fold-and-cut technique; rather, the artist drew shapes upon paper, cut them out through hand and then used the pieces as templates completely through this work and the watercolors. The cutout, at about 116 through 176 inches, is a delicate and immense cast that, like Milloff's, demonstrates the artist's single-minded devotion to his subject

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