With the heightened awareness of a person who, lacking one sense (hearing), develops another (vision) in compensation, Sung misses nothing, uncovering the most minute clues to character in the carriage, posture, and expression of her subjects.  Some of the subjects she knows personally--they are family members.  Others she knows through the medium of the written word and descriptions written by A.J.  But whether familiar through life or literature, Sung's subjects tell their own story and each is an individual blessed by the special grace of her special devotion to color, line, and form.

Influenced by the realistic portraiture of 18th century painters such as John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart, Sung combines realism with a Dadaist strain of humor, presenting some of her subjects in 18th century dress, to affirm the value of painterly skills in a modern era of abstract art, where anything goes.  But this context also includes illustration of a literary text as art, not as a low form to be disparaged as commercial, but as an opportunity to re-create an imaginative reality as real in its way as the dream world of surrealism, and as powerful.

Sung's deft hand and acute eye can create drama out of the texture of a smile or the tell-tale contours of a face.  Sung's subjects live; they are not mere copies of reality, and the spirit of life Sung breathes into them leaps into us.  Sung has even painted a detailed portrait in watercolors, accomplishing the near impossible rendering with an accuracy, true to life, that converts realism into the subtlest impression of a life force  bigger and more powerful than every tribulation in the way of a soul's, or person's, quest for immortality.  (See this portrait of an elderly gentleman, "Nonno," on the Summary page of this website.  Click here.)

Sung tends toward the taciturn when it comes to talking about art in abstractions.  But if pressed, she will exclaim, "Color!"  And she will talk about learning the secrets of her palette with all reverence and energy of an initiate in a sacred mystery.  Sung's approach to learning her art, besides taking classes, is to pore over books and spend time in galleries.