Maki Na KamuraB-DU DU

B–DU DU … the title, whose meaning is to be found in its meaninglessness, stands as an example of Maki Na Kamura’s understanding of and relationship to painting. The artist stands for a pictorial language of the nonconformist, the unliterary, as when she places gestural schemata read off from the figures of Jean-François Millet’s “The Gleaners” (1857) into an abstract plane. Maki Na Kamura’s latest coup is her turn towards the imagery of K-pop. The thoroughly styled, uniform-seeming video appearances of the Korean boy bands, with their hypersynchronous formation dances performed with military drill, function like single images illustrating an event – comparable, say, to the battle panoramas of the Peking Opera – yet are entirely emptied of meaning. In an era other than our own, such excerpts of observation and the imagery arising from them would have been described as symbolist; today, however, they are highly topical “real” poses and attitudes that present individualistic moods of a kind that can only be conveyed by the suggestive power of the single image.

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin, 28/4 – 5/6/2021