Stylistically, Kwan Jin Oh is a fascinating case in dualistic layering. On the surface, the artist's compositions are staunchly realist, and engage in many of the tropes of even hyper-realist traits, such as obsessively clean depictions of the pictorial plane, and the elongation of the objective viewpoint from which a certain rhythmic breath can be derived. The subject matter, often floral vases, lies calm and meditatively in view, like a yoga practitioner or a Buddhist monk, forever unwaveringly noncommittal in their engagement with the external world, and in this way, may perhaps achieve a transcendent reality beyond the reach of mere mortals. Thus, the viewer is well-served to feel drawn to Kwan Jin's porcelain vases, the beautiful twigs, the dainty flowers and poetic leaves, you are entitled to fully comprehend them as they are: ontological markers of a world as is.

Yet, if one looks careful enough at such a compositions brimming with coolness and steely resoluteness, you will be tempted to discover the intellectual depth underneath the technically perfect representations that leads you to an astonishing conclusion. The realism is only skin deep.

The objects are all cleverly idealized; the flowers are all executed with flattened perspectives, neither truly realist nor actually representational. Every one of the gorgeous details that draw in the viewer's attention are achieved thanks to the peculiarity of the perspectives of the artist: which makes you question, is this the appearance of things of the world, or the appearance of things of the painting?

Even if we may never be able to answer this dualistic inquiry, it is of great importance to the meaning of these meditative paintings, because it is fundamentally of ontological import, for they open wide am existential rift: a realist existence does not imply the ideal existence. In particular, the semblance of realism can only achieve so much, if even if it perfect, since this perfection only reaches to the level of the pictorial composition, but can never reach to the grounds of existence. Hence, to circumvent this limitation of realism, the artist reaches to a deeper layer of being, namely, that of the idealized world.

For Kwan Jin, this ideal world is one of wonder and of desultory freedom, one where all the fleeting impressions of the worldly existence, and their ultimate emptiness, amalgamate in the elemental layer of transcendent insight. The art critic Ekin Erkan explains this insight thusly: “Oh’s mending of realism and the impressionistic—of natural semblance and the constructed stage—parallels a coordination of life and its still, petrified opposite. Notably, the opposite of life is not presented in these paintings as death, but instead as an empty lifelessness that contains life. On the one hand, the jars quite literally contain life, which is displayed with petal-rowed branches and flowers that unfurl and reach out from the cold, crisp jars. On the other hand, the jars also contain a mode of seeing—the jars center the painting’s composition and, consequently, direct our visual field.” This containment is the ultimate meaning of dualistic ontology: if life contains art, and art contains life, then the two containers must be equal.

(The Poetics of Reality and the Question of Ontological Idealism, Text by B. S. Alexander, PhD)