Oh’s scenes here are of several types: clouds and sky, trees and bushes, open roads, city streets, village neighborhoods, urban vistas. Repeatedly, the place examined is New York, Santa Fe, or the Korean town of Sabuk. Oddly, given that so little wide-open countryside is on view (even when the site is near Santa Fe), people rarely appear. A few New Yorkers, seen in passing—that’s it. Here and there a dog occupies the foreground of the composition and commandeers our attention. Otherwise, Oh’s world is depopulated—a realm of dwellings without visible inhabitants. This is a major clue that, despite first impressions to the contrary, his work is not primarily about the outer world but about internal processes, about a landscape of the mind.

Look closely at the worked and broken textures of his laid-on acrylic paint, the blurred and blended edges of his pastel forms. The artist intentionally disrupts the surface at the very place where the eye meets the object. He clearly knows that too much precision, as in machine-like schematic renderings, is deadening to the imagination. For the goal here is not to duplicate reality (what, after all, would be the point of that?) but to stimulate and examine the process by which we apprehend reality.

From [Second Sight: Oh Chi Gyun’s Mental Optics],
by Richard Vine