Kumi Yamashita at Kent - New York

In her first New York solo show, Kumi Yamashita, a Japanese artist who has lived much of her life abroad and first came to the U.S. as a high-school exchange student in 1984, presented two distinct types of work. Close-up portraits of six individuals are formed from rubbings of the sitters' credit cards. Five other works focus on shadow pictures created by bright light cast at an oblique angle across various relief materials attached to the wall. In both cases, an elusive image derives from an unexpected means that has no obvious visual relationship to the result.

The portraits, of subjects varied in age and race, seem to be soft renderings with a sort of pixel effect. All are 17 by 12 inches, dated 1993, and so tightly focused on the faces that not even the sitter's neck or hair is fully visible. When you look closely, you notice strings of numbers, and sometimes you can make out a bit of a name against the silk-tissue ground. In Credit Card Portrait (Saburo), the name imprint appears in Japanese phonetic characters. These are street faces, ordinary-looking people you wouldn't remark on. The dotted effect seems tender, and the drawings are strikingly beautiful. Yet by defining and identifying people with a purchasing device, Yamashita makes a sharp comment on our impersonal and commercial times.

The shadow pictures are most interesting for their visual trickery; the pictures themselves are not particularly compelling. One of the simplest is a painted-wood cutout of an exclamation mark that, mounted on the wall and lit from the side, casts the shadow of a question mark. There's also a metal circle that protrudes at an angle from a contoured wall surface and throws a square shadow. Though simple in appearance, they are similar in conception to a far more complex work, Lovers (1998). Here, two ragged, treelike shaped-aluminum planes, 3 inches deep at most, stand out from the wall. The shadows they cast depict a young man and woman, approximately life-size, who are holding hands and running. You study the irregular forms, considering how the shadow images are created by the angle of the light and the distance of the image from the shadow-making form. It's a mind-twisting shift of perception.

All in all, however, the sleight might seem slight without some further purpose. Vicki Halper, writing of Yamashita's work when it was shown at the Seattle Art Museum in 1997, made note of the artist's peripatetic life and her reluctance to talk about her work by observing, "Shadows are a fine medium for someone who believes more in variability ... than in constancy, a stance that may be temperamental as well as philosophical." Such a supposition gives the work greater resonance.

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