Bakhyt Bubikanova, who works using a variety of techniques including painting, collage, installation, performance, photography, and video art, belongs to the younger generation of Kazakh artists. For the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Bubikanova presents a painting series set in what looks like a Toulouse- Lautrecian cabaret. The works, painted in the style of traditional Oriental Miniatures, contain motifs that are closer to Uzbek or Persian, but there are traces of deliberate erasures and eliminations. A sense of emptiness and incompleteness, which Bubikanova describes as the ‘Absence Spirit’ is an integral part of the artist’s paintings. According to the artist, this spirit is something that is not material, something that cannot be ‘seen with the eyes, heard with the ears, felt by the skin’. By removing excess elements from the paintings made in the style of ornate and decorative Oriental Miniatures the artist draws attention to this ‘Spirit’. On the one hand, Bubikanova’s refusal to populate her paintings with texts and objects offer familiar, yet entirely different interpretations of traditional miniature paintings from Central Asia; on the other hand, her explicit emphasis on copying questions the meaning and value in repeating certain customs, styles or tropes of cultural practice.