“ Water flows, but it also lingers...”
A conversation between THE TAGLI founder and director Dimitrios Tsivrikos and artist Heeyoung Noh on her solo exhibition, Submerged Attachment, presented by the gallery at 67 Great Titchfield St, London.
DT: The title Submerged Attachment evokes both emotional entanglement and the sensation of being immersed. How did this title come to represent the themes of your exhibition?
HN: 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.
DT: Water appears both literally and metaphorically throughout your work. What does water symbolise for you in relation to memory, identity, and the maternal body?
HN: Water flows, but it also lingers; sometimes forever, creating new worlds of it's own. (Just as standing water over time becomes home to an entire ecosystem of life.) Water that begins at the top of a mountain becomes a stream, then a brook, eventually a river, and finally flows into the ocean. Along the way, it reshapes the landscape: parts of a mountain that once seemed immovable collapse, terrain shifts, and even rocks are worn smooth into pebbles by the current. I see this nature of water as deeply connected to how shared memories and emotions are passed down through generations. When a historic event takes place, whether within a community or a nation, no matter how much time passes, things can never return to the way they were before. That irreversible transformation reminds me of the nature of water.
Yet water, in its stillness, also carries infinite potential. When it gathers and remains in one place for a long time, it doesn’t simply stagnate - it creates an entirely new ecosystem. In much the same way, we are all formed while submerged in our mother’s amniotic fluid. For me, water is a key metaphor that runs through my work. It represents intergenerational memory and emotion, identity, and the maternal. This is why I continue to produce images that evoke a sense of dampness, wetness - images that symbolically refer to water and everything it holds.
DT: Your palette often shifts between softness and intensity. How do colour and texture serve as emotional tools in conveying complex psychological states?
HN: I don’t consider myself someone who uses a particularly wide range of colours. The two I primarily work with are Prussian blue and cadmium scarlet. These two hues feel almost like polar opposites. The vivid, striking intensity of cadmium scarlet evokes a sense of raw, living wound, or simply, aliveness. On the other hand, the deep, weighty Prussian blue metaphorically represents layered, long standing emotions, what I would call a sorrowful heritage. It’s a colour that, to me, is well-suited to expressing what lies beneath the surface, what exists below consciousness.
DT: There’s a recurring tension between concealment and exposure in your compositions. How do you negotiate visibility when dealing with deeply personal subject matter?
HN: I try to expand personal narratives into the realm of the collective. So while the images may stem from personal experiences, I intentionally avoid embedding too many individual characteristics into them. For example, in my Face series, I erase distinct facial features and only present the overall shape of the face. Although the story takes place in a deeply personal space, such as the place like inside a shower booth, by removing personal traits, I suggest that the story is not just one person’s, but a shared experience.
In my mother-daughter paintings, facial features are visible, but I still aim to make them about all mothers and all daughters, not a particular pair. To achieve this, I use metaphorical imagery like the two black dogs to shift the narrative from the personal to the universal.
DT: In many of your paintings, the domestic and the ritualistic intersect. What role do everyday gestures like bathing play in your exploration of heritage and healing?
HN: First of all, I would like to clarify that my bath paintings originate from the Korean bathing practice known as ttaemiri (exfoliation scrubbing). The widespread adoption of ttaemiri is closely tied to the early 20th century, during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, when the colonial government propagated the narrative of Koreans being “unclean and uncivilised.” In response, many Koreans began to bathe compulsively, turning the act into a symbolic gesture of liberation and resistance.
My work began from a deep interest in how this historically traumatic practice has transformed into an everyday gesture. As I began performing ttaemiri regularly, not in Korea, but in Scotland, I came to realize how such a traumatic heritage profoundly shapes personal identity.
The act of gazing at my own naked body for an extended period of time prompted the question, “Who am I?". This question became a starting point for exploring the seed planted beneath my consciousness which is passed down across generations. In a way, I believe this exploration may serve as the first step toward healing what can be metaphorically described as transgenerational trauma.
DT: You’ve previously spoken about memory being bodily. How does your practice make space for the somatic experience of trauma, particularly in relation to feminine lineages?
HN: I believe that certain intense experiences inevitably leave physical traces on the body. Among various studies on transgenerational trauma, some even suggest that trauma can alter an individual’s DNA. In my painting “How to rub my back?”, which is painted on a wooden panel, the directions of the scrubbing are carved into the surface.
When I was more focused on the theme of transgenerational trauma, I used this kind of irreversible, physical inscription on the surface as a metaphor. More recently, however, I’ve been actively incorporating the image of water droplets into my work. In many of my paintings, countless droplets sit on the surface of the skin—not flowing, but rather fixed in place, as if frozen in time.
These eternally un-drying droplets can be seen as traces of memories that can never be erased from the body. This is especially evident in my Mother and Daughter series, where the wet bodies of the mother and daughter are surrounded by water droplets. Here, the droplets serve as a metaphor for shared memories that will never be washed away.
DT: How do you approach the concept of intimacy in your work, both in terms of subject matter and the viewer’s experience of the painting?
HN: In my work, I try to approach the concept of intimacy in a more ambivalent way. I want to explore not only love and affection within close relationships, particularly within families, but also the presence of hatred and anxiety.
By delving into these intimate dynamics, I hope to expand the conversation toward the shared memories between those who are connected by blood, and further, to the shared emotions and memories of people living in the same era. Within these shared experiences lie complex emotional layers: love and fear, compassion and resentment. I carry a vague hope that my work can reach into that layered emotional world. Perhaps that's why I depict such private and vulnerable scenes, such as moments of bathing or showering, as a way of sharing them with the viewer.
DT: Do you see your practice as a form of emotional archaeology, excavating inherited stories that may have been submerged or silenced?
HN: “Emotional Archaeology”...what a fitting phrase to encapsulate my work in just two words. I believe that tracking inherited stories submerged in the unconscious is the most crucial first step toward understanding oneself.
In the process of tracing my identity within the place I now live, I find myself unearthing and exploring the seeds passed down from my mother and her mother, seeds that have settled deep within the realm of the unconscious. This excavation offers a possibility, however slight of answering the fundamental question: “Who am I?”.
DT: In a rapidly globalising art world, how do you stay rooted in cultural specificity without being defined or confined by it?
HN: I spent most of my formative years in Korea, and growing up as a Korean has undeniably shaped the foundation of who I am. However, I see my Korean identity as merely a starting point for understanding my more fluid and evolving sense of self. For that reason, I don’t feel the need to deliberately preserve a fixed cultural identity in my work. Whatever image I create or story I tell, it inevitably stems from that cultural foundation, whether consciously or not.
DT: Can you speak about the balance between narrative and abstraction in your paintings? How do you decide what to reveal and what to leave ambiguous?
HN: My work often depicts highly specific situations, but I don’t believe those images need to follow a clear or linear narrative. I try to leave space in the composition so that viewers can project their own experiences and emotions onto the scene. While this may come across as abstract, I believe the interpretation of each situation belongs to the viewer, not to me. Rather than offering a clear directive like “this is how it should be understood”, I focus on conveying how I felt in that moment. The images may appear uncanny or difficult to grasp, but they are simply emotional responses to particular situations, not didactic stories.
DT: Has your relationship with painting changed since beginning work on Submerged Attachment? If so, in what ways?
HN: In the past, I considered painting simply as a tool to reproduce the images I had in mind. But now, it feels more like raising a child with a will of their own. (Though I’ve never raised a child myself, so I’m not sure if that’s the best analogy!) I struggled a lot, especially while working on Fierce Attachment. The painting refused to go in the direction I intended, which was incredibly frustrating although, after much effort, I was eventually satisfied with the outcome. This experience made me realise how essential it is to study the materiality of painting more deeply. Through that process, I began to think differently about painting itself. What I once saw as a matter of technique, I now experience as a relationship.
