B.G. Muhn at Space Untitled - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 1997 by Eleanor Heartney

A transparent snake coiled over three colored eggs, a skinned animal carcass suspended above a red oval, a pair of yellow hands cupping a disembodied, screaming head: in these unsettling paintings, Korean artist B.G. Muhn makes the bizarre oddly convincing.

Each of these dream-like images contains at least two elements which tend to hover in an empty, ambiguous space. In part, their strangeness comes from the peculiarity of the interactions. No explanation is offered, for instance, when a nun and a gorilla open their mouths in apparently harmonious song, or when a gaping yellow mask floats apparently unsupported in the air before a bizarre-looking character chuckling with fiendish glee.

What makes these images both disquieting and compelling is the sense that they are merely the visual manifestations of mysterious hidden forces. They suggest a world populated by embodied spirits which seem more often malevolent than benign. Frequently one senses that a transference has taken place between man and animal. Dogs, in particular, but also birds and reptiles, assume a human aspect, appearing as bearers of secret wisdom. Humans, meanwhile, become almost bestial and are frequently characterized by open, howling mouths.

The paintings vary in size and format. They are painted with thick strokes of pigment that curl fluidly around the depicted objects. Images are rendered realistically but not naturalistically: faces have eerie blue or yellow casts, tongues and lips are abnormally red, and forms emerge out of grounds that are intensely crimson, blue-black or green.

The largest painting, My Love Sweet Baby, is the least successful, perhaps because it contains too many elements. A huge blue potato bound with ropes hovers above a doll-like baby encased in a box. In the lower corner, in an unrelated vignette, a snake's head emerges from beneath a small Buddhist mask. More effective are the smaller works, particularly a series where Muhn has set aside his solid rendering for a more washy, impressionistic effect. These works begin to bring to mind the spontaneity of traditional Asian brushwork. This is particularly evident in The Queen Past, in which the sketchily described head of a dog in a colorful cap dissolves into a veil of drips and thin washes.

Muhn has noted that dreams often serve as inspiration for these works, and indeed, they seem to inhabit the territory between reality and imagination. Too vividly represented and too powerfully felt to be mere illusions, they nag at the viewer's consciousness with unrelenting persistence.