dialogue
Heeyoung Noh | Artist
May 2025
9 min read
Heeyoung Noh paints from the threshold, between past and present, presence and absence, self and society. Her practice is anchored in intimate rituals and private reflections that quietly unfold into powerful meditations on identity, memory, and intergenerational trauma.
Rooted in her lived experience as a Korean woman abroad, Heeyoung's work began to crystallise during her time in Scotland. It was there, in the unfamiliarity of distance, that her sense of self began to sharpen. What might seem like everyday acts, scrubbing the skin, bathing alone, recalling a shared gesture with her mother, become, in her hands, profound acts of recognition and excavation.
In her Ttaemiri series, the body becomes a terrain through which inherited histories are made visible. Skin, hair, water, these elements are not mere motifs, but conduits for cultural memory. The droplets she paints never quite evaporate; instead, they linger in perpetuity, mirroring trauma that resists erasure. This physicality, tender, raw, sometimes violent, serves as both metaphor and memory.
Yet Heeyoung resists prescribing meaning. Her work exists not to direct but to provoke, to stir recognition, to hold space for interpretation, to invite viewers to find their own reflections within hers. Whether portraying solitary figures or familial pairs, her canvases hum with unspoken tension, with inherited emotion, with the echoes of hands once held and backs once scrubbed.
Photo of Heeyoung Noh in studio. Courtesy of the artist.
Hey Heeyoung! Having completed your MFA at the Glasgow School of Art, has your time in the UK shaped your perspective on art and identity in any way?
“My experience at the Glasgow School of Art was truly enjoyable and fruitful. However, it wasn’t simply because I was enrolled in the MFA course there that I was able to develop my work in this way. Living outside of Korea, in a completely different country, was like breaking out of an eggshell in Demian, a shocking experience that also brought constant external stimuli, allowing me to explore myself more deeply. It was only after leaving Korea and settling in Scotland that I was able to fully realize my identity as an Asian woman. From hair colour to religion, everything around me was different. Through that contrast, I was finally able to begin exploring the identity of “Heeyoung Noh.”
Life after graduation became somewhat simpler. I spent most of my time painting in the studio. For almost a year after graduating, I minimized contact with the outside world and focused solely on my work. That period allowed me to specify the direction of my practice. If the time I spent in school was about exploring the possible directions of my work, then the time I spent alone in the studio after graduation was about understanding whether the direction of my work aligned with the images I was producing, about discovering what exactly I was seeking from those images.
Through this period of intense focus, I experienced significant improvement in technical aspects, and more importantly, I began to seriously reflect on what painting means to me as an artwork.”
Heeyoung Noh, A mother and her daughter, 140 x 230 cm, Oil on canvas, 2024.
Your work often centres the female body as a focal point. How do you approach the representation of skin, hair, and physicality to explore themes of identity and cultural memory?
“My focus on depicting the body, particularly the skin and hair, began with a personal experience of scrubbing my body in a small accommodation shower booth. In that dark, confined space, I spent a long time observing and rubbing every corner of my body. This repetitive act led me to objectify my own body, not perceiving it as “my body,” but rather as something that needed to be thoroughly cleaned and stripped of every trace of dead skin cell. The gaze I directed at my own body, along with the compulsive scrubbing I performed on my skin, felt deeply violent. To me, this mirrored a kind of metaphor for colonialism. This led to my first nude painting series, Ttaemiri Series.
Furthermore, my identity exploration, rooted in the background of being an East Asian woman from Korea, eventually led me back to observing my own physical body. My black hair, soft and undefined facial features, and ambiguous skin tone serve as elements that reinforce my identity as an East Asian woman.
Through this, I began to understand the image of the body not only as a reflection of my identity, but also as a medium through which the act of bathing could become a way to explore transgenerational trauma.”
Heeyoung Noh, Bitches, 102.5 x 152.5 cm, Oil on canvas, 2024.
In your Ttaemiri series, you draw from the traditional Korean bathing ritual. What do you hope this ritual communicates to viewers through your paintings?
“The history of public bathhouses in Korea is not particularly long. Of course, Koreans did bathe in the past, but bathing was more of a ceremonial act done on special occasions, such as on Dano (a traditional holiday) or during holidays, or for therapeutic purposes like hot spring baths. However, the widespread cultural adoption of public bathhouses stemmed from a different origin.
In the late 1890s to early 1900s, during the era of Korea’s gate opening to the world, members of the enlightment movement advocated for the establishment of public bathhouses as a step toward becoming a "civilized nation," emphasizing urban hygiene and cleanliness. As Korea entered modernity, the practice of scrubbing the body (ttaemiri) in bathhouses became widespread.
What is particularly interesting is that during the Japanese colonial period, the act of ttaemiri began to be associated with more than just cleanliness and hygiene, it came to carry a sense of inferiority. The Japanese defined Koreans as "unclean," thereby branding Korea as a backward nation in terms of progress. This discourse of power was then replicated across other cultural spheres. The perception that Koreans were colonised because they were less clean than the Japanese was internalised by Koreans themselves, eventually developing into an obsessive scrubbing culture. As colonised subjects, Koreans began to associate the dead skin cells on their bodies as a symbol of impurity that supposed to be eliminated for their independence. It became a residue that needed to be cleansed, not only physically, but psychologically as well.
This historical trauma surrounding bathing practices has now become embedded in what is often seen as an unique aspect of Korean bath culture. I found this ironic and fascinating, and that is what led me to begin the Ttaemiri Series.
Going further, one of the most immediately recognisable elements of the public bathhouse is water. In my work, “water” and “droplets” are crucial motifs. In my paintings, water droplets clinging to the body may seem like they’re about to vanish, but within the image, they remain forever suspended. These eternal, un-evaporating droplets serve as a metaphor for transgenerational trauma, something that stubbornly refuses to disappear. Traces of water, droplets, wet hair, bathhouse tiles, or bathtubs, serve to connect the figures that appear in my paintings. When two different people share a humid space and bathe in the same tub, we can think of them as being linked through the medium of water.
In this way, the bathhouse in my work is both a metaphor for historical and transgenerational trauma, and also a space that allows people to become connected to one another."
Heeyoung Noh, Umbilical cord, 43.5 x 35 cm, Oil on canvas, 2025.
Your practice engages with colonial trauma and the Korean diasporic experience. How do you navigate these layered histories in your work, and what conversations do you hope to spark through them?
“Rather than focusing solely on colonial trauma in Korea, my work brings together various experiences that form the basis of transgenerational trauma among Koreans, such as colonial trauma, war trauma, and trauma caused by state violence, through the motif of ttaemiri (Korean body scrubbing). (Among these persistent historical traumas, I do consider colonial trauma to have the most significant weight.)
In the Ttaemiri Series, the carved directional lines can also be interpreted as metaphors for the enduring nature of trauma. Since I have already discussed the connection between ttaemiri and colonial trauma, I would now like to talk more about how ttaemiri relates to diasporic experiences among Koreans.
Personally, I scrub my body about once every two weeks. I remember the first time I tried to do this after moving from Korea to the UK, in the small shower booth of the accomodation. Sitting crouched in the dimly lit, cramped space, scrubbing my skin, I realized for the first time that I was truly living as a complete foreigner in this land. That moment of realisation came because I couldn't reach my own back.
In Korea, even people living alone can visit a public bathhouse to have a ssaesin-sa (scrubber) help them, or they might go with a friend and scrub each other’s backs. In my case, I usually went to the bathhouse with my mother, and we would scrub each other’s backs. But in this country, I had no one to entrust my back to, no family, no friends, not even a stranger who understand the ttaemiri culture. This absence represented more than just the lack of someone to help me bathe; it signified the absence of intimate relationships and also of a shared cultural understanding. In that moment, I think I began to truly understand what it means to live as a complete outsider.”
Heeyoung Noh, How to rub my back?, 154.5 x 122 cm, Oil on wood panel, 2024.
Congratulations on your recent solo exhibition Submerged Attachment at The Tagli gallery, taking place from 8 to 13 May. How did you come to the title, and what can audiences expect from the exhibition, visually, emotionally, or thematically?
“One of the paintings in my exhibition is titled Fierce Attachment. It depicts an older mother and daughter, both nude, with two black dogs running in the background. The inspiration for this work came from Vivian Gornick’s book Fierce Attachments, which explores the intense anger, obsession, and love that exist within mother-daughter relationships. Its themes strongly resonated with the series I’m currently working on, and I felt the title itself captured much of what I was trying to express in the painting.
Through painting, I often explore the shared memories and emotions that are passed down across generations. I see the vivid memories and feelings of my grandparents’ generation being transmitted through my parents and eventually reaching me, like small seeds of emotion buried beneath the surface, quietly germinating through my own body. Because my grandparents, my parents, and I are all bound together through attachment, I felt that the term Submerged Attachment aptly captured the emotional undercurrent running through my work.
This exhibition presents a layered exploration of the themes I have been investigating: the transgenerational trauma of being Korean, the deeply rooted anxieties and traumas of being an East Asian woman, and the complex relationship between mother and daughter as a source of these experiences. I believe the works have been curated in a way that allows these narratives to unfold naturally within a single space, offering a smooth and cohesive visual journey for the viewer.”
Heeyoung Noh, Ttaemiri series, 186 x 150 cm, Oil on wood panel, 2023.
What kind of dialogue do you hope your work encourages, across generations, genders, or cultures?
“To be honest, I don’t hope for a specific type of dialogue to emerge from my work. Rather, I believe that if my work sparks any kind of conversation, whatever form it may take, then it has succeeded as a piece of art.
Although I spend a great deal of time painting, I believe that once a painting is hung on the wall for viewers to encounter, my relationship with that painting is, in a way, concluded. From that point onward, it becomes about the interaction between the viewer and the work. Of course, the long period of engaging, breathing, and conversing with the painting while creating it doesn’t lose its significance (at least, it means a great deal to me) but once the work is complete, I feel that the ball is entirely in the viewer’s court.
That’s why I don’t want to say something like, “I hope the audience interprets my work in this or that way.” Whatever the response may be, if someone is reminded of something, anything, through my painting, even if it's something entirely different from what I intended, I would still be happy.”
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