Review: We Bury The Landscape - Kristine Ong Muslim

We Bury the Landscape is an exhibition of literary art. One hundred flash fictions and prose poems presented to view. From the visual to the textual, transmuting before the gallery-goer’s gaze, the shifting contours of curator Kristine Ong Muslim’s surreal panorama delineate the unconventional, the unexpected, and the unnatural.

This collection of flash fiction was inspired by paintings and photographs and each story is an extension, an interpretation or a look inside the separate works of art. Ms. Muslim's writing is very visual, so much so that reading her stories is like looking at images on canvas, all you need is a tiny bit of imagination to see it in color.
The stories may not describe the art that inspired them but they are tied to it, especially in execution - abstract works yield equally abstract fiction, and more traditional subjects result in stories that are more easily processed by those with limited appreciation for modern art. Being one of the latter while I can see the merits of this collection the pieces aren't something I particularly enjoyed reading - in literature, as in visual art, I prefer fiction that reads more like Vermeer's paintings look, as opposed to Bosch's. If your artistic preferences tend in the opposite direction and you enjoy flash fiction I would venture to guess that you will very much like this collection.