The ostensible subject of the Vietnamese born painter Hung Viet Nguyen is the landscape of his adopted state, California, which he transforms into a surreal terrain unlike any other, in his "Coastal Sensuality" series, seen on his website: www.art-hung.com.

The swelling biomorphic forms with which Nguyen maps out the topography of his unique aesthetic territory could be likened to those of the great autodidact Joseph Yoakum, who strongly influenced Karl Wirsum, Jim Nutt and other artists of Chicago's "Hairy Who" school. However, learning that Nguyen has a degree in biology sheds light on his diagrammatic approach, and his work also relates to Miro's early, surreal, semi-figurative phase — most particularly Miro's "Catalan Landscape" in the collection of MoMA.

Indeed, like Miro's, Nguyen's forms are at once fanciful and sensual, while the linear elements that contain them add consider­ably to their appeal. For Nguyen conducts the viewers' eye over land masses and bodies of water with a flowing line that he casts out like a lariat to capture contours and establish almost dizzying pictorial rhythms. Tiny, through the sky, minus­ cule fish, or shadowy, rudimentary human swimmers seen below the surface of shimmering blue waters invest the pictures with a whimsical narrative quality.

There can be no doubt that Nguyen is a "visionary" in the very best sense of that over­ used and often wrongly attributed term; for as rooted in the specifics of landscape as they may be, his paintings are possessed of a magical unearthliness that is enhanced by his skills as a colorist. He reportedly begins with a layer of pastels and later adds oils in an elaborate process of painting, scraping, repainting, layering, and glazing that results, over a period of weeks, in luminous hues and sensuous textures.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these paintings, however, is how all of the disparate elements in the compositions achieve such unity as to make the landscape appear to be a single anthropomorphic organism, with rubber, writhing limbs posesed of weird kinetic life. In "Coastal Sensuality No.6," for example, two identical mountains near the top of the composi­ tion suggest the full cone-breasts of a recumbent female figure, while the curve of the shore­ line in the fore­ ground suggests her parted legs, with the river below flowing from the crux of her sex. By contrast, in "Coastal Sensuality No 9," the river flows upward at the center of the composition and the brilliantly colored land masses and tributaries surrounding it, combined with the ornate configura­tion of stylized trees at its pinnacle, evoke the elaborate brocade robes and crown of a queenly personage.

Whether such allusions are intended or not seems entirely beside the point. For it is his ability to enlist the imaginative collabora­ tion of the viewer that makes Hung Viet Nguyen a compelling and rewarding painter.

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Ed McCormack