Maki Na Kamura: B-Du Du: Cat. Cfa Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

The title, with its meaning to be seen in its meaninglessness, exemplifies Maki Na Kumara’s understanding of, and relationship to, painting. The artist stands for a pictorial language of the maladjusted, the non-literary, when she, for instance, places gestural schemes adopted from the figures of Jean-Francois Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) into an abstract surface. The latest coup is Maki Na Kamura’s turn to the imagery of K-Pop. Thoroughly styled and homogeneous in appearance, the video performances of Korean boy groups, in their hypersynchronous formation dances performed with military drill, function like individual images illustrating an event, comparable to the battle panoramas of the Peking Opera, yet entirely devoid of meaning. At any other time, such observational excerpts and the imagery arising from them would have been termed symbolist, but today these are highly topical real poses and attitudes that present individualistic moods of the kind that can only be conveyed through the suggestive power of the individual image.