"As long as the roots aren't severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden." So says Chance the Gardener in Jerzy Kosinski's satirical 1979 film, "Being There." The simple-minded man's plain observations — gleaned from television and gardening — catapult him to unlikely national prominence.

That movie's fictional president of the United States also reflects, "Life is a state of mind." His sentiment, with its Proustian and Buddhist undercurrents, perhaps best captures the tone of Sanit Khewhok's current Nu'uanu Gallery exhibition, also titled, not coincidentally, "Being There."

And it's a feeling that viewers will take from this exhibition: a vague, lingering sense of having been permeated, for a time, by the silent machinations of an extraordinary mind seeing simply.

"Being There" presents 25 small oil-on-canvas paintings by the classically trained Khewhok: renderings of the artist's own surrealistic three-dimensional sculptures; expressionistic portraits; and meticulously detailed landscape paintings of garden flora at The Contemporary Museum, where the artist works.

While such variety can represent as lacking focus, here cohesion is amply provided by both the paint's fine, soft quality and the paintings' mysterious content. Those uncanny undertones make Khewhok's modest vision, not unlike the fairy tale gardener's, distinct and revelatory. Here, the ordinary becomes numinous.

It's an interesting choice to recreate one's own sculptural works in paint. Some, rendered flatly without much articulation of space, appear slyly humorous — such as the quirky ladder, impossibly levered on a denuded, necklike tree trunk in "Painting II."

Other sculptures, placed in more illusionistic space, read like esoteric footnotes to an art history of the surreal — a cool objectivity afforded by their duplication in paint, as if the artist is scrutinizing the products of his subconscious with the same careful, distancing gaze normally reserved for the external world.

Of these works, the most charming and intimate is "Self Portrait," which situates a white spindle chair (drawn from an antique doll's chair) in a room's corner. The warm, coffee-colored background is the sort of richly modulated surface customarily reserved for classic portraiture; here, the "sitter" is the unassuming, solid, straight-backed seat — an ironic self that inhabits the space around the body.

"Interrogation" pits the same chair, presumably still the self, in dialogue with an imposing, fantastical sculptural form, whose spiny, fish-form tail extends from a branchlike arm, all inconceivably balanced on a tree stump. This unreal conversation between self and tortuous other is a witty, figurative take on "interpersonal" dynamics.

But it is Khewhok's garden paintings that most balance a droll, distancing vision with the sense of also "being there," as in being firmly rooted in the world. Take the deceptively innocuous heirloom vegetables that flourish in "Gardener's Legacy II." Their lushness distracts from nearly hidden eyes that peer out from the painting's dim background; according to the gallery, the planted peepers belong to Vice President Dick Cheney, a play on "Big Brother."

In "Quiet Corner," a toilet sits nakedly amidst luxuriant garden foliage — apparently drawn from an actual scene that Khewhok witnessed on the job. When visiting artist Maria Elena González recreated a single-residence floor plan last year on the museum grounds, the toilet, originally intended to mark the bathroom, was rejected during installation for aesthetic reasons.

Any toilet in art inevitably resurrects the worn trope of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's urinal. But this isn't just a toilet: It's a painting of a discarded object, once meant for an earnest — not absurdist — artwork. The image comments not just on the scene's obvious absurdity, but also on the absurdity of making art, and the continuing relevance of the original Dadaist question about what art is, or isn't. It's that kind of keen notation that distinguishes Khewhok's vision.

The toilet isn't the only neglected thing in the garden. The quietly brilliant "Weeds II" depicts a prone, partially draped man on a bare mattress. His lower limbs, reduced to stubs, recall war, violence and disease — human atrocities. With chin slightly raised to chest, he levitates, it seems, over weeds gone to seed. The exquisitely drawn figure (reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David's Neoclassical painting "The Death of Marat") is at once counterpoint and parallel to the flowering weeds. Both survive, untended; both insist the manicured garden is a facade. And though the man does not seem impervious to suffering, his meditative pose evokes Buddhist transcendence over the human condition.

So is all well in the garden? There are fruits — even weeds grow from cracks in soil and stones. But with a skull as topiary, an orchid morphing into an owl that stands vigil over a trashed New York Times, Cheney's eyes peeking out from behind staked veggies, and a portrait of the so-called Cat Lady (plastic surgery addict Jocelyn Wildenstein) pointing "The Way Forward 2006," as that painting's title suggests, the answer may very well be: not quite.

ROAD TO HAWAI'I: THROUGH ITALY, BANGKOK

Don't let his modest demeanor fool you: Thai-born Sanit Khewhok has led a remarkable life, spanning continents and cultures. The man behind the quiet paintings was, for years, curator of modern art and associate director of The National Gallery in Bangkok — and an ordained Buddhist monk. Now managing The Contemporary Museum's collections, Khewhok also holds degrees in art and restoration from schools in Italy and Thailand.

— Marie Carvalho