Why whole groups of people would tend to paint or write in similar fashion in a mutually identifiable and intelligible manner is a question to be answered by anthropologists. But this much is clear, success in art or literature has tended to require identification with some group.

So to give their art a name and make it as if part of a movement, Sung and A.J. have chosen to call their art, the art of Garden Urthark, Mute Art. The term Mute Art is a half-serious, half-playful attempt to define the artist's relation to the artwork or art world as one of speechlessness.

From this point of view, the artist, not being without education, whether with or without the facility of actual speech, is incapable of explaining the artwork in any systematic or consistent way, except as a pattern of influences from other artists, nature, God, and other people.

The idea for Mute Art comes from the literary criticism of Northrop Frye, who said: "Criticism can talk and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say anything. And whatever it sounds like to call the poet inarticulate or speechless, there is a most important sense in which poems are silent as statues" (Anatomy of Criticism).

Since Sung is deaf, she does not mean to offend deaf people with her use of what is now considered a highly pejorative term in relation to deaf people. A.J. is hearing and can speak with his voice as Sung, who is deaf, can speak with hers. Yet in relation to their art, they find the term mute to be equally valid and expressive as a descriptive term.

As they say in their book: "Our art varies in its approach, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes romantic, sometimes realistic, surrealistic, or Dadaist, but what unifies all our art is not our approach but our relation to it. We are as if mute before it."