Master of Fine Art School of Fine Art
Heeyoung Noh
Heeyoung Noh is a mixed-media artist who explores colonial trauma and diaspora by reproducing body images from South Korea. She received a B.A. from Sungshin Women’s University in 2019 and an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in the UK. Her practice entails a critical perspective toward very private body feelings and diasporic identity as an Asian woman. Throughout the creative practices, which are about the journey of finding the collective identity in the domestic place, the shower room facilitates tracing the colonial vestige inscribed on the skin. Hee Young explores the transgenerational trauma in her daily life. She uses the image of naked women as a metaphor for collective identity and collective trauma, which is deeply ingrained in domestic daily life, such as in conversations with her mother or during solitary moments like showering. She portrays women who have suffered deep wounds in the patriarchal society, where they have both endured and caused pain for survival. She also represents her own experience of feeling micro-aggression as an Asian woman through images of women whose skin is extremely blushed.
As an artist, Heeyoung had several group shows in South Korea. In 2021, she participated in an artistic project <DODODODUK> that was sponsored by the SFAC (Seoul Foundation for Art and Culture) and Seoul Artists’ Platform New&Young. Moreover, she is co-founder of an artist collective called LAG Collective, which is comprised of two artists and one curator. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the New Contemporaries Prize.
A dog and her owner
This piece evolves around the theme of anxiety. However, while it depicts a woman handling her anxiety, her face remains unseen. A black dog with an aggressive demeanour rests its drooping head on her pelvis. This imagery represents an aggressive defence mechanism born out of anxiety, yet it simultaneously exudes a highly seductive quality. Her left hand is placed on the dog’s head as if pressing it down, symbolizing her attempt to suppress her anxiety.
Living as an Asian woman in the Western world, anxiety plays a significant role in my daily life. This anxiety, deeply rooted in my early childhood in the United States, is familiar yet incredibly exhausting in day-to-day activities. However, anxiety also prepares me for unexpected situations. For instance, two years ago, while smoking with fellow Asian female friends in front of the school dormitory, we were hit by a toy bullet. Thanks to my underlying anxiety, the incident didn’t shock me as much as it could have.
This black dog represents both my guardian and a parasite that drains my energy.
A Mother and Her Daughter
The work, titled “A Mother and Her Daughter,” was inspired by conversations I had with my mother during a two-month stay in Korea. Since last year, I have been visualizing personal experiences stemming from collective identity, focusing on moments in bathhouses and bathrooms. These discussions led to stories about my mother and her relationship with her mother (my grandmother).
Korea has long been a patriarchal society, particularly from the late Joseon period, influenced by Confucianism. In the 1950s, women born during the war had to earn money to support their brothers and families amidst the country’s tumultuous political situation. With fathers and brothers often lost to the war, every male was precious. My grandmother grew up in this environment, doting on her eldest son. She ran a mill, using the proceeds to support him through repeated university entrance exam failures and expected her second daughter to help with his education. However, my mother was too intelligent to be sent to a factory to fund her brother’s tuition. She secretly took the university entrance exam and was accepted into a prestigious school. When my grandfather found out, he was furious, questioning the point of a woman studying. Eventually, they compromised, and my mother attended a school that offered a full scholarship.
When my mother married my father, my grandparents gave her only a blanket and a gold ring, while later gifting a house to her eldest brother. This persistent gender discrimination within the family was culturally tolerated. My mother longed for solidarity and protection from her mother as a fellow woman but resigned herself to the inevitable. As my grandmother aged and lost her husband, she increasingly depended on her eldest son, who resented it. Even when my mother was battling breast cancer, her brother scorned her, accusing her of flaunting her illness and neglecting their ailing mother. Despite undergoing chemotherapy, my mother cared for my grandmother, who, in a moment of lucidity in a hospital bathroom, apologized, saying, “I’m sorry.”
This story represents the experiences of women in Korean society who have been oppressed over generations by dominant narratives and entrenched powers. My grandmother believed that the only way to survive the harsh patriarchal system was to raise her eldest son to be successful. My mother understood this but felt deep resentment. In an irrational and inhumane patriarchal society, they hurt each other in their struggle to survive but ultimately found solidarity, caring for each other in the bathhouse.
This painting, depicting two women—one middle-aged and the other elderly—bathing together and holding hands, challenges typical representations of mother-daughter relationships, often shown as a young girl and a thirty-something woman. By focusing on a middle-aged daughter and her elderly mother, I aimed to highlight the collective and historical trauma inflicted by the state and patriarchal power. The image of the fifty-something Asian woman was generated using AI in Photoshop to create an average representation of women of that age, emphasizing that this story is not just about my family but a common experience in society, not only in Asia. To convey a multi-layered feel, I painted approximately six layers, starting with dark colors and progressing to bright ones. The water droplets in the painting play a significant role, evoking a deep sense of sorrow by leaving viewers uncertain whether they are tears or just water.
The face
The painting titled “The Face” does not contain a personal narrative. Instead, it tells the story of the sorrowful heritage of East Asian women, with painfully red, swollen-looking skin contrasting with wet, black hair. The nature of figurative painting involves depicting identifiable forms, allowing viewers to imagine the context based on the clear images presented. In the painting, a faceless woman has just emerged from a bath in a bathroom. Liquids—whether sweat, water, or tears—are running down her hair and face. I used intense red colors to connect the image of longstanding suffering with that of a hot bath. A hot bath is a necessary step before the process of scrubbing (ttaemiri), softening the skin right before the scrubbing begins.
The woman in the painting has no face, so no expression is visible. By omitting the face in this painting, I aimed for the work to be perceived not as an individual narrative but as a communal one.
How to rub my back?
Living in a completely unfamiliar land, one of the most frustrating realizations is my inability to reach my own back for a Ttaemiri scrub. Back in my home country, I could rely on my mother or sister to help with this, and I’d reciprocate by rubbing their backs – a gesture of mutual support within close relationships or even among strangers who shared the Ttaemiri culture. However, here, I struggle to find family or close friends who can assist with this ritual or even strangers who deeply understand the Ttaemiri tradition. The red hand reaching out as if to grasp someone’s back and the oddly broad, unattainable back in this painting convey a sense of helplessness and loneliness.
The painting implies the feeling of solitude as a foreigner living in a new and unfamiliar land and inscribed sorrowful legacy in the body. Ttaemiri, a way of bath in Korea, which is rubbing the body compulsively
The hallabong is sad
This painting is related to the next project by LAG Collective titled “A Diary of the Orange Girl.” I mimic the behavior of the dominant powers who categorize all Asians from the vast Asian continent as Chinese by forcibly stamping the word “Orange” on the skins of various citrus fruits. For this project, I chose the hallabong, a fruit primarily grown on Jeju Island, a large island in the southern part of Korea, and created an image of it placed on a ritual candlestick. I intended this work to serve as a trailer for the next project. The woodenware depicted in the painting, commonly used in Korea, symbolizes the deep-rooted Confucian spirit, as these items are used in rituals performed during major holidays like Seollal and Chuseok, as well as on the anniversaries of ancestors’ deaths.
Women raised in Korea often react quite sensitively to these rituals. I, too, have had experiences from a very young age helping my mother prepare pancakes and other foods for these rituals. In my case, because the rituals honor my direct ancestors, I did not feel it was particularly unjust. However, the image of women, who are not directly related to the male ancestors being honored, spending two to three days preparing ritual foods, struck me as unjust.
Hallabong is a specialty fruit of Jeju Island. Unlike the mainland of the Korean Peninsula, Jeju Island has traditionally had a strong matriarchal society. The creation myth of Jeju Island features a giant woman, and there’s a saying that Jeju Island has an abundance of women, wind, and stones, indicating the significant female population. Thus, by using the image of hallabong, I metaphorically represented the image of women who were sacrificed in the patriarchal Confucian society.
