Press | Marinaburana

A DROP OF WATER, solo exhibition, Tamsui Historical Museum, TAIWAN.

The Representative Office of Argentina in Taipei. A DROP OF WATER - Marina Burana solo show 一滴水 | 明蓮花個展, TAIWAN.

Configured Personas, Alfa Art Gallery, NEW JERSEY.

Salon of Painting at Menduiña Schneider Art Gallery, LOS ANGELES.

2022 Global Women’s Art Festival, TAIWAN.

The Resilience of Flowers, solo show, Marina Burana, Gallery by MUI.

Texts

"A Nest of Boxes": The Interconnected Worlds in Marina Burana’s Art
by Grace Evans

In Marina Burana’s paintings, the human body is never whole, never isolated. It dissolves into foliage, merges with the contours of mountains, and flows like water through luminous layers of paint. Her art, at once intuitive and deliberate, resists the boundaries between figure and landscape, reminding us that the human and the natural are parts of the same evolving organism. Through bright, dripping colors, and organic gestures, Burana constructs a visual language of unity and transformation. Her work embodies an ecological sensibility that speaks to the interdependence of all forms of life, a vision in which everything is connected and constantly becoming something new.
What makes Burana’s vision particularly distinctive is the way she merges elements of Western and Eastern life and thought. From the Western tradition she inherits a fascination with individuality, gesture, and emotional expression. From Eastern philosophies and everyday life, she draws a sense of balance, impermanence, and the interconnectedness of all things. Her art becomes a site of dialogue between two worldviews: the Western impulse to express and the Eastern impulse to dissolve, to let go of the self and merge with the whole.

Color and Gesture

Marina’s technique is as central to her meaning as the subjects she portrays. Her palette explodes with vivid color; saturated pinks and purples, and lush, extravagant greens layered in ways that defy realism but evoke sensation. Paint drips and flows down her canvases, giving her work a sense of gravity and motion, as though each image is still forming itself. The intuitive, gestural quality of her brushwork recalls the emotional immediacy of Abstract Expressionism, yet Burana’s approach is not purely expressive, it is also ecological. Her gestures mimic natural processes: the flow of water, the growth of roots, the drifting of clouds, the arrangement of flowers and leaves.

Humans Within Nature

One of the most striking features of Burana’s art is her refusal to depict the human body in full. Instead, torsos or faces emerge and dissolve within landscapes. In Light On (2025), the characters seem to sprout from a stream of bright yellows, blues and greens, supported by mountains in the background. The incomplete forms do not signify absence but rather integration, the idea that the human body is not separate from the environment but an extension of it.
This fusion of body and landscape disrupts traditional Western representations of nature as a backdrop or passive resource. Instead, Burana envisions nature as a living continuum in which the human form is simply one temporary expression. Her fragmented figures convey a kind of humility, an acknowledgment that identity is porous and shared. The body’s incompleteness mirrors the fluidity of ecological existence: we are always in the process of becoming something else.
Her imagery bridges two philosophical perspectives. From the Western side, we see echoes of Romanticism; the yearning for unity with the sublime forces of nature. From the Eastern side, her dissolving figures embody the Buddhist concept of anatta, or non-self, where the boundaries of ego and matter disappear. The result is neither purely Western nor purely Eastern, but a synthesis that feels distinctly contemporary: an art that recognizes both the individual’s emotional depth and their fundamental interdependence with the world.

Process and Material as Meaning

Burana’s materials and process reinforce her conceptual vision. Her use of dripping paint is not accidental; it is a metaphor for the uncontrollable, organic forces that shape both art and life. Gravity becomes a collaborator, allowing paint to trace its own paths across the canvas. In this way, her paintings embody the unpredictability of natural systems: erosion, rainfall, growth, decay. Each mark is both intentional and spontaneous, reflecting the tension between human agency and the autonomy of matter.
This approach positions Burana’s practice within a lineage of artists who blur the boundary between control and chance. Like Helen Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell, she embraces fluidity and gesture as a means of expressing emotional and environmental connection. Yet her work also resonates with the philosophies of Eastern brush painting, where surrender to the medium is an act of mindfulness. By relinquishing some control to the flow of paint, Burana enacts a balance between will and acceptance; a harmony central to both Taoist and ecological thinking. Her paintings thus do not depict nature from the outside; they participate in it, allowing material and gravity to act as co-creators.

Everything Is Connected

Underlying all of Marina Burana’s work is a profound meditation on interconnection. Her paintings are visual essays on the idea that nothing exists in isolation. The fusion of body and landscape reflects a worldview in which all elements (mineral, vegetal, animal, and human) are part of a single, evolving organism. This perspective aligns with contemporary ecological philosophy, which understands the environment not as a collection of separate entities but as a web of relationships and exchanges.
In Golden Hour (2025), streaks of yellow and green intertwine with the face of a woman, contemplative in one corner. The image suggests both emergence and dissolution, as if identity itself is a temporary ripple on the surface of a vast ecological sea. The painting evokes a sense of awe and fragility, something to remind us that the boundaries we draw between “self” and “world” are illusions sustained by habit, not by truth.
Burana’s integration of Western and Eastern influences deepens this vision of wholeness. Her Western training gives her work structural boldness and emotive intensity, while her engagement with Eastern philosophy infuses it with calm, continuity, and acceptance. The result is a visual harmony between expression and meditation, between the act of painting and the act of being. In an age marked by division (between cultures, species, and even within the self), Burana’s art insists on unity.

A Nest of Boxes

The title A Nest of Boxes takes its inspiration from Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth-century poem “Of Many Worlds in This World.” In the poem, Cavendish envisions existence as a series of nested boxes, “degrees of sizes” that hold countless, invisible worlds within worlds. This image of infinite containment and hidden life resonates deeply with Burana’s artistic vision, where each form opens onto another, and boundaries dissolve into continuums. It also reflects the layered nature of Burana’s own life: an artist from Argentina, with Algerian, Italian, and Spanish roots, living and creating in Taiwan. Her identity, like her paintings, exists within intersecting worlds (cultural, linguistic, and spiritual) each shaping and refracting the others. Just as Cavendish celebrates nature’s capacity to contain “a world of worlds,” Burana embodies this multiplicity in both life and art. Her nest of boxes becomes not only a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all living things, but also a personal map of belonging across places and traditions, where each world is folded gently inside another.

Conclusion

Marina Burana’s paintings offer more than visual pleasure; they offer a vision of belonging. Through her vibrant palette, intuitive strokes, and fluid merging of forms, she transforms paint into a language of interconnectedness. Her fragmented bodies do not represent loss but communion; the dissolution of boundaries that allows life to flow freely between forms. In her art, dripping pigment becomes a vision of continuity, color becomes breath, and the human body becomes a landscape of transformation.
By merging Western expressiveness with Eastern balance, Marina Burana creates an art that feels both worldly and timeless. Her canvases are meditations on the delicate, ever-shifting relationship between self and environment, passion and stillness, control and surrender. In her world, to paint is to participate in the same cosmic rhythm that animates all living things.
Burana’s work reminds us that to see ourselves as part of nature is not a retreat into romanticism but an act of recognition. Everything we are, our bodies, our emotions, our art, participates in the same ongoing process of evolution that shapes rivers, mountains, and forests. By painting the world as a single, living continuum, Marina Burana renews our sense of wonder at the simple, profound truth her art makes visible: everything is connected, and everything is becoming.

*****

The relational in Marina Burana's A Nest of Boxes

by Martin Coppersmith

In Burana’s paintings, people and nature are never separate. Human shapes appear and disappear inside the landscape. A body might turn into a mountain, or a flow of water. The lines between people and nature blur until they almost vanish. Everything seems to move, to grow and dissolve, as if all living things share the same heartbeat.
At first, her art looks peaceful. The colors are bright and fluid. Paint runs down the surface like rain. There are no hard borders, just soft movements of light and form. It feels like a world where everything is connected. But if you look closer, another story appears. When Burana paints more than one figure, something quiet and tense fills the space between them. They stand close, but they do not meet each other’s eyes. They seem aware of each other, but they do not communicate. It is as if they belong to the same dream but live in different thoughts.
This distance between figures gives her paintings their emotional weight. It feels like there is something unspoken between them, a kind of loneliness inside the shared space. Even though their bodies sometimes blend together, their minds do not. They are united by the same flowing colors, but separated by silence. This feeling mirrors our own world, where people live side by side yet often fail to understand each other.
Burana’s work shows that being connected does not always mean being close. The figures share one environment, one flow of paint, one breath of nature, but that does not guarantee harmony. The mountains and plants around them accept them completely, yet they remain strangers. In her world, unity is real, but it is not simple. The same force that brings things together can also make them lose shape, lose boundaries, lose voice.
Her way of painting adds to this tension. The paint seems alive: it spreads, drips, and fuses on the surface. Sometimes she lets it flow freely, other times she controls it carefully. The mix of accident and intention creates a strange rhythm. The figures look like they are forming and disappearing at the same time. One moment you see a face, and the next it turns into color. It feels like the moment before a word is spoken, but the word never comes.
This push and pull between control and chaos mirrors the relationships between her figures. They are made from the same colors, the same gestures, but they struggle to remain themselves. They want to connect, but something stops them. Sometimes they seem too close, so close they begin to lose their edges. Other times they seem far away, even though they share the same light. This tension keeps the paintings alive.
In many of her works, two or more figures stand side by side. They might be lovers, siblings, or strangers, it is never clear. The space between them feels charged, almost magnetic. They look like they could touch, but they don’t. Maybe they can’t. They seem caught in the same current of paint but facing different directions. That small gap between them feels full of meaning, like a silence that says everything.
Burana’s art goes beyond the idea of harmony between humans and nature. She shows a world where everything is connected, yet still apart. Her paintings do not celebrate unity as something easy or pure. Instead, they explore how fragile it is. To dissolve into the landscape can feel calm, but it can also feel lonely. It can mean losing your own voice in the larger sound of the world. Her figures show this double feeling: they belong, but they also disappear.
Her vision speaks about how all life is interdependent, yet still struggles to understand itself. The figures’ lack of communication might be part of this truth. Maybe it is not a failure, but a kind of balance. In nature, everything connects, but not everything speaks. Trees and rivers share space without words. Burana’s people do the same.
Maybe the quiet between them is not emptiness but transformation. In her paintings, forms are always changing: human into mountain, mountain into body, color into plants. Communication also changes form. It moves from words to gestures, from gestures to paint, from paint to feeling. Her art does not show people talking to each other, but it makes the viewer feel their connection in another way, through color, rhythm, and movement.
Burana seems to say that connection and distance can exist together. Her paintings hold both. They remind us that being part of the same world does not mean we always understand each other. Yet even in silence, something passes between the figures; a shared presence, a quiet awareness. Everything is connected, even when it seems apart.

*****

“A drop of Water”

2 April - 28 April, 2021

Tamsui Historical Museum, Taipei

by Mary B. Williams

Lush depictions of flowers, intense use of texture, deliberate inattention to scale and perspective. Marina Burana’s paintings give us the feeling of things multiplying, evolving, mapping out a full drama of shades and forms that talk about the ever-changing richness of life.

A glass vase is rapidly outlined with dashes of color to suggest water and stillness. But after a moment, we are left wondering whether those energetic splashes of paint represent a glass vase at all. Red colors vibrate in what seems to be a bunch of waratahs dancing over a green background that engulfs them but yet brings them forward. While Hydrangeas (her favorite flowers) try to fight back an overwhelming dripping of paint, Roses join forces to practice sophistry and seem to climb out of the canvas.

There is always a struggle in Burana's work. A convoluted sequence of enunciation and silence. Nature is presented in its rawness and, although there, signs of human intervention are slowly abraded and, in many cases, questioned. Marina often says that the process is everything. She is a doer of the impossible: she paints the transient, that which escapes us constantly.

And when it comes to process, Burana goes even further. Together with her canvas paintings, she presents us with the making of Tapa; barkcloth made from the Paper Mulberry tree. An indigenous practice of South East Asia and nations of the Pacific. She first encountered this practice in 2015 through her indigenous friends of Taiwan who make barkcloth for different purposes. But many years went by before she decided to start making it herself.

To talk about the making of Tapa ("shu pi bu" in Chinese), Burana quotes Roger Neich and Mick Pendergrast in "Pacific Tapa" (University of Hawai'i Press, 1997): "This method commences by stripping the bark from the tree, separating the inner from the outer bark, which is discarded, and then beating the inner bark on an anvil, usually with wooden beaters, to spread the fibres." The process of beating takes months, she says, and it is overall a very labor-intensive, profound activity that speaks to the collective. Burana grows the trees herself, made her own tools and spent time with knowledge holders who showed her the nuances and secrets of this practice. Then she started painting on the barkcloth with Chinese ink and earth pigments.

"In a way, this exhibition", Marina confides to me, "is a contradiction, a reflection of my own inconsistency as part of these terrible, all-consuming systems that we live in and that we can't escape from". She makes reference to the fact that, on the one hand, she deals with sustainable materials (when making Tapa) and, on the other, mass-produced objects such as canvases, oils, brushes, acrylics, etc. She is now developing her own oils, "but the road to sustainability is long and arduous for me", she adds demurely.

"A drop of Water" is a body of work that was selected by the renowned Tamsui Historical Museum in New Taipei city to be part of their annual exhibition program. A difficult and surprising accomplishment for an immigrant in Taiwan (and even for locals). But Marina shrugs, smiles and looks away with tenderness, almost like a little child. You can tell the concept of change is a big thing for her and it doesn't really let her savor the arbitrariness of labels and permanent structures. Just like her flowers, which in their dynamic of transformation defy limits and go beyond any constraint.

*****

"Rhapsody on a Windy Night"

3 November - 25 November, 2018

SLY art space, Taipei

by Tim Wang

Marina Burana frequents the entanglements of the abstract. "I would say this exhibition is a celebration of the personal wanderings of the mind", she explains in her artist statement.

Inspired by T. S. Eliot's poem "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and her personal relationship with the sea and plants, Marina paints the delusions of memory with the elements of the natural world. The puzzling reality born out of the incongruity of what we think we know sprouts up before us in the diversity of colour and the intermingling of textures that are usually found in nature.

"When we swim, once we are underwater, it's as if we were no longer connected to the outside world, with what happens on the surface", she explains. "Suddenly, the sounds are muffled, distorted. What we see is not as clear as what we see on land. Our bodies feel lighter and everything somehow seems like a dream. Reality takes on new dimensions and then there's the looming need to go back to the surface to breath. Kind of like memory. Once we are underwater (“wanderers in our personal memories”) the surface (“the material world”) seems something that's in another plane of existence. Something to what we will go back sometime soon, but that can actually wait a little longer as we explore the vastness of the unknown, of that enigmatic cosmos that has the potential of killing us and also of giving us joy".

From her deep love of poetry, and literature in general, she showcases pieces that touch on what we experience in our everyday lives but can't put into words. With an array of beautiful imagery, Marina Burana explores memory and life. She summons in her paintings the impermanent by way of lively hues and thick brushstrokes. She has an innocent smile when she talks about memory and nature. She doesn't seem to believe her own words. Her paintings talk for her, though. What she can't mention, her brush accomplishes in oodles of emotion and authenticity.

風夜狂想曲-介紹

明蓮花

「風夜狂想曲」是T.S. Eliot的詩。這首詩是本系列畫作背後的靈感來源，所以我選它作為這次展覽的名稱。這首詩講述某人夜裡在街上徘徊、迷失在自己的思緒，他看著自己周遭的世界，而他也是這個世界的一部份。詩中描述了記憶等短暫的東西、存在的肉體性(也就是物質世界)之間的拉扯。這首詩感覺像是擺盪在記憶之流和家庭生活之間的一支舞(或是如我剛才所說的，是一種拉扯)，它時不時會打斷陳述者的遊蕩，因而創造出一些揮之不去的物質與非物質意象。

十二點鐘。

沿著掌握在月光合成中的

街道的各處地方

在悄悄施展著月亮的魔術

消融著的回憶的立足點

以及所有它的清楚關係

它的各種分歧與準確性,

我經過的每盞街燈

像一面決定命運的鼓在敲響,

而通過那些黑洞洞的空間

午夜在搖撼記憶中過去的一切

像一個瘋子搖撼一株死了的天竺葵。

我徘徊在這首詩裡時，感受到一股衝動；我想重新定義某些意象，把它轉化成我自己的回憶和事實。我私密的存在論。

記憶無情地拋出的

是一堆扭曲了的東西;

海灘上一根扭曲的樹枝

已沖得光而且滑

好像世界暴露了

它骷髏的秘密

僵直而白。

我在讀這首詩的時候，腦中馬上浮現了海的意象。我和海洋一直有很深的緣份。我人生大部份的時間都在凝望廣大的海洋或悠游其中。我們游泳時一進到水裡，彷若就和外界、和水面上的一切隔絕開來了。忽然間，各種聲響都變得模糊、扭曲，我們的視線也不若在陸地上時那麼清楚。身體感覺變輕了，一切感覺都像在夢境裡。現實以新的樣貌呈現，我們隱約感到回到水面呼吸的需求；這些都和回憶相似。當我們進到裡(遊走在我們自己的回憶裡)，水面(物質世界)看起來就像存在於另一個平面，那是我們很快就會回去的地方，但我們其實可以在水下再待久一點，探索無邊的未知，還有那可能會讓我們窒息或帶給我們喜悅的神秘宇宙。

我發現了回憶和水下世界之間的關聯，並起把它們轉化成我的畫作，它們的共通點就是流動變化的色彩和各種交錯的形狀，就像無情地拋出一堆扭曲東西的記憶。

我很早就決定不要把重點放在詩中呈現的回憶和物質世界之間的拉扯，還有兩者的似非而是的並存關係。我想探索回憶所帶來的複雜意象，還有它們的流動和軔性。

上述兩個主題(回憶和物質世界)間的拉扯在詩的結尾找到答案。詩中的主角感到沮喪挫敗，他的存在是無可避免的現實，他只存在於無限循環的過往畫面和快速萎縮的肉體之中。

燈說,

“四點鐘,

這裡是門上的門牌。

回憶!

你掌握鑰匙,

那盞小小的燈在樓梯上留下一個環形。

登樓。

床是鋪好的;牙刷掛在牆上,

把鞋脫在門口,睡吧,做好一輩子的準備。 ”

利刃的最後轉動。

但這首詩同時也展現了物質世界和精神世界有多麼交錯不清。一方面有牙刷、鞋子，「為生活準備」等屬於有限世界的東西，但另一方面又有睡眠、黑暗、無意識等閉上眼睛進入最高深莫測的心靈狀態這樣的東西。在在都留給讀者一股無力感，讓他們看到到頭來物質世界還是戰勝了心識偶爾會踏上的道路；一條不切實際、沒有結果的路。

這種複雜的關係成為我畫作中拉扯/舞蹈的根基。但當我投入創作過程時，這股拉扯變得不再那麼重要，我轉而探索另一層拉扯關係：用顏色親密的舞動代表回憶。

我認為這次的展覽是在歌頌個人心靈的神遊。