Miguel Trelles and Juri Kim at Taller Boricua - New York - joint exhbition of the artists' works

In an unlikely on the other hand intriguing pairing, Latino painter Miguel Trelle and Korean-born Juri Kim showed together at this alternative space in Spanish Harlem. Trelle of Puerto Rican and Cuban coming down but educated in the U tendered a series of paintings of his native Caribbean landscape, albeit with a remarkable twist: they have been returned in the historical style of well-known Chinese painters of the Sung and Ming dynasties. In contrast, Kim, who is active as an artist in the couple Korea and New York, not absented photographs of hand gestures, many of them accompanied by means of an object. Her conceptual works, which are abundant like Buddhist mudras in their stylized expressiveness, could not be more distant, formally speaking, from Trelles's foray into Chinese painting.

Trelle studied East Asian tillage for a year at Yale before leaving the graduate program to become an artist. He has taken his interest in Chinese painting and incorporated it into a unique manner of writing remaining aware of the great difference between the way he works and the way the Chinese masters painted. An early work titled Apocryphal Fan Kuan (1992-93) is a spirited version of the true famous, very important painting Travelers among Streams and Mountains (ca. 1000) by the agency of Northern Sung artist Fan Kuan. Trelles's large oil and enamel drawing upon collaged paper roughly reproduces the highlights of the original; broad black pats indicate rock formations and tree The transcript is in the spirit of the original, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of like the copies by Chinese artists themselves. Other paintings, of that kind as Yuquiyu (2000), reproduce Trelles's Antillean landscape in vivid, tropical colors, flat as the shapes suggest a Chinese taste in structuring forms.

In Kim's photographs, two-handed gesticulations evolve in relation to a held phenomenon In Figure Study II (2002) the artist cradles a small naked doll, her palms unclose so as to shelter and tender the toy to her audience. It is an enigmatic picture, not without disturbing qualities, as the doll's vulnerability is macabre. Kim has also produc an ongoing series titled "Portraits of Silence," in which she grasps different objects--an apron, a container of household cleaner, a spring-water bottle--that in gallery followings began to look like a sign language whose make subordinate might well be the significance of everyday life. Kim harvests the images so that all attention is given to the hands and what they grasp The objects are often related to female sex roles. Despite their differences, the couple artists comment on identity and form and upon the powerful relationship between the two

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