Chinyee Sung, who signs her paintings simply Chinyee, has worked for over 20 years with the United Nations as a simultaneous interpreter, conveying information back and forth between Chinese and English; her difficult job has been to render ideas from one linguistic medium into another, very different one. But for a still longer time she has challenged herself with an even more difficult task: that of translating wordless emotion into visual form. The sensitively executed abstractions of this artist succeed in expressing in paint things that could not, perhaps, be expressed in either of the verbal languages she commands.

Chinyee holds an M.A. in Art Education from New York University - but her sensibility retains unmistakably oriental undertones. If she reflects something of de Kooning's aggressive spontaneity, she nevertheless suffuses her work with that serenity of assurance that characterizes the Chinese masters, and her vigorous brushstroke suggests the calligraphy that forms an integral part of the classic art of her ancestors.

The delicacy with which Chinyee lays her pale blues over pink and juxtaposes bold black with vivid green reflects an extraordinary chromatic refinement. She achieves an exceptional intensity, even in pastel shades. Her exhibition "Recent Paintings: Oil on Canvas," which will be at Gelabert Studios, 255 West 86 Street a Broadway from October 15 to 28, is organized
around d a division of her work into four series distinguished by the color emphasized. In all, whatever the color that predominates, the composition subordinates each tonal element to an overall effect of harmony and balance.

The first of the color groups in order of date of composition-blue-favors a pale, almost pastel shade of that color, often surrounding and embracing a pink core. Her green paintings have a lush, vivid, tropical character, dark streaks like the bamboo so favored by the traditional artist of her country arching gracefully across the canvas. A series featuring gold has a solemn radiance that conveys a spiritual feeling, and indeed several compositions quite deliberately suggest church windows. And the indigo paintings are vigorous and dramatic, their slashing lines of a blue that is almost black suggesting the calligraphic paintings of Franz Kline or Robert Motherwell.

Chinyee's work rarely relates to specific elements of nature, though much of it seems drawn from natural landscape. An art of the spirit, it derives from deeper sources, beyond space and time. But June 4,1989,was a day which stirred the emotions of the world, and the Chinese-born artist was inevitably impelled to respond in her own medium. Her two strongly conceived and movingly executed canvases on the tragic events at Tienanmen Square in Beijing project the horror, anger and grief those events inspired. They are work of exceptional clarity and force. TheWorld Cried Out Over the Tienanmen Square Massacre, its violent strokes of indigo and black flowing down like a tornado on dripping blood-red horizontal bands of color through a turbulent sky, is a statement of anguish and compassion as powerful and as trenchant as any editorial.