Picture an installation of Contemporary East Asian art, and something distinctly Postmodernist comes to mind — something along the lines, say, of Takashi Murakami’s eye-jolting, cartoonlike characters, or Cai Guo-Qiang’s simulated exploding cars. In this company, the paintings of the South Korean artist Oh Chi-Gyun (b. 1956) take surprisingly innocent pleasure in one of the conventions of Western art. His Impressionist landscapes and cityscapes vary between the poignant and sentimental, and from the grittily authentic to the derivative, but all show a commendable drive and independence in the installation of 50 of his canvases at the Chelsea Art Museum. Founded in 2002, the museum is the home of the Miotte Foundation, which has the dual missions of exhibiting established and emerging international artists and of preserving the legacy of the painter Jean Miotte.

Mr. Oh studied painting in Seoul and then New York in the mid-1980s before making Seoul his permanent residence in 1998. He has regularly visited America since then, and his medium-to-large-sized canvases, spanning the last 16 years, depict scenes of New York and Santa Fe as well as the Korean mining town of Sabuk. Though he works from memory and photographs, the painter proves himself a capable Impressionist, employing a vivid range of tones and hues to evoke sensations of sunlight and distance. His greatest technical innovation lies in his paint handling; working with acrylic paint and modeling paste, Mr. Oh mixes and applies his colors solely with his fingers. His resulting surfaces seem not so much stroked as dabbed in swirling clumps, or thickly streaked; smoother areas of sky appear rubbed to a burnished lumpiness. Mr. Oh’s Impressionistic renderings are so adept that one momentarily startles to see them applied with equal candor to such disparate scenes as Korean huts and New Mexican deserts — but this is simply proof that Impressionism is the lingua franca of painting, equally meaningful in all areas of the globe.

Impressionism’s short suit is formal rigor; Monet tended to favor descriptive moments over a gravity of design. But 20th-century painters ranging from Bonnard to Nell Blaine uncovered plenty of formal vitality in the idiom of broken-up color and suffusing light. At his best, so does Mr. Oh. “Spring of Sabuk” (2001) captures the vivacity of sunlit rooftops, spreading horizontally in the sunlight between the fluffy whiteness of a foreground tree and the background of deep blue; in a gap at the center, the darks of doorways and two small figures sound succinctly against the brightness of a wall. In “Summer of Sabuk” (2001), a flutter of pinkish-purple roofs descends poignantly through a valley, like the seesawing of a sheet of paper dropped on a windless day.

On another wall, four large aerial views of New York City are darkly radiant, capturing its vastness in innumerable tones of bluish, greenish, and purplish grays. Of these, the archly titled “Cement Yard I” (1993) is especially fine, with sunlight-carved forms of foreground buildings dissolving into a patchwork of subtle hues as one progresses up the avenues. “Empire State” (1994), too, appeals, with its evocative divisions between striated blue sky, twilit high-rises, and the cooler massing of lower buildings, split by the warm canyon of an avenue dotted with streetlamps.

Other works, however, revel in just the conventions of Impressionism, and these feel surprisingly dated for work produced by a Contemporary painter. In “Winter Night of Sabuk” (2007), the single sensation of the gleam of a streetlight on snow-laden roofs seems to motivate a shadowy kneading of surface, without much consideration of the formal ramifications of winding rooflines. Here, the artist’s indulgent textures become oppressive, reminiscent of Thomas Kinkade’s mechanical bids for sentiment. In other paintings, the visual paradoxes — the single window amid a sea of rooftops, for instance — seem luxuriously illustrated rather than realized rhythmically. Like a number of paintings, “Soho II” (1993) could be the work of a talented but minor associate of Monet or Pissarro; it beautifully captures local nuances — in this case, the varying sheen of a dog’s fur — while leaving other elements simply to fill in.

And yet, another painting of a dog from the same year, the striking “St. Marks Pl. I” (1993), shows Mr. Oh at his strongest. Here he rises to the peculiarities of his motif. The strange twisting outlines of the canine respond to the angled legs of passersby; its gesture seems, almost unwittingly, the culmination of the textures of fur. In the equally intense “Persimmon Tree II” (2000), the robust straggle of a tree, erupting into open sky from a dense wedge of shadow, deliciously conveys the unlikeliness of nature.

The exhibition continues on to the museum’s mezzanine level, where a number of remarkable paintings of Santa Fe reflect a kind of stark richness. In “Winter Santa Fe II” (2003), chewy bundles of snow-covered bushes march into the distance beneath a dark blue sky. The fiery, clotted glimmer of distant structures in “Sunset in Santa Fe” (1995) brings to mind a vision of Pompeii. Such images take the artist to strange and personal places well beyond the confines of Impressionism. They may not be cutting-edge, and they certainly don’t amount to the redefinition of landscape implied by the exhibition’s title, but they show the advantage of proceeding from a well-traveled idiom: In adopting a stylistic school as a vehicle, artists sometimes find themselves pursuing expressions far deeper than style.

Until July 12 (556 W. 22nd St. at Eleventh Avenue, 212-255-0719).