“Miguel Trelles and Juri Kim at Taller Boricua”
“Art In America November 2003, pg 169.”
In an unlikely but intriguing pairing, Latino painter Miguel Trelles and Korean-born Juri Kim showed together at this alternative space in Spanish Harlem. Trelles, of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent but educated in the U.S., offered a series of paintings of his native Caribbean landscape, albeit with a remarkable twist: they have been rendered 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 both photographs of hand gestures, many of them accompanied by an which are much like Buddhist mudras in their stylized expressiveness, could not be more distant, formally speaking, from Trelles’s foray into Chinese painting.
Trelles studied East Asian culture for 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 style, remaining aware of the way he works and the way the Chinese masters painted. An early work titled Apocryphal Fan Kuan (1992-93) is a spirited very important painting Travelers among Streams and Mountains (ca. 1000) by Northern Sung artist Fan Kuan. Trelles’s large oil and enamel drawing on collaged paper roughly reproduces the highlights of the original; broad black strokes indicate rock formations and trees. The copy is in the spirit of the original, much like the copies by Chinese artists themselves. Other paintings, such as Yuquiyu (2000), reproduce Trelles’s Antillean landscape vivid, tropical colors, even as the shapes suggest a Chinese taste in structuring forms.
In Kim’s photographs, two-handed gestures evolve in relation to a held object. In Figure Study II (2000), the artist cradles a small naked doll, her palms open so as to shelter and offer the toy to her audience. It is an enigmatic picture, not without disturbing qualities, as the doll’s vulnerability is macabre. Kim has also produced an ongoing series titled “Portraits of Silence”, in which she holds different objects—an apron, a container of household cleaner, a spring-water bottle—that in gallery sequences began to look like a sign language whose subject might well be the significance of everyday life. Kim crops the images so that all attention is given to the hands and what they hold. The objects are often related to female gender roles.
Despite their differences, both artists comment on identity and form and on the powerful relationship between the two.

--Jonathan Goodman