A young, faceless woman with dark hair stands in the shower, her skin flushed and
glistening with moisture. As beads or water roll down her visage, the humidity is almost palpable, intensified by the quiet solitude of washing oneself. Like much of Heeyoung Noh's work, The face (2023) offers a simple yet uncanny portrait of the female form as a vessel for inherited and unspoken trauma. Often drawing on ttaemiri, a Korean bathing ritual, her paintings examine various psychosomatic burdens, from matrilineal grief to the alienating
experience of immigration.
Born in 1995 in Incheon, South Korea, Noh moved to Scotland several years ago to attend the Glasgow School of Art. It was in this foreign context that she first contronted ner identity as an Asian woman, grappling with racial microaggressions, the isolation and anguish of cultural disorientaton, and a dramatically altered self-perception. The brooding damsel in Bitches (2024) incarnates this emotional turmoil - nude and curled up on a bed, an ominous black dog nestled against her back. The haunting composition recalls Johann Heinrich Füssli's 1781 painting The Nightmare; but here, despite the protagonist's apparent vulnerability and forlorn demeanor, her gaze remains unnervingly direct.
The sable hound reappears in The milk of disquiet (2025), where it nurses a naked, sweaty woman. The work alludes to the ancient myth of Romulus and Remus - twin brothers abandoned at birth and rescued by a she-wolf who suckled them. Noh's raw depiction of survival effectively captures the complex relationship between mother and child, marked by animalistic vitriol and friction, yet interspersed with moments of nurturing tenderness.
Fierce Attachment (2025) further explores the fraught yet precious connection between women across generations. Taking its title from Vivian Gornick's memoir, the oil-on-canvas portrays an elderly lady beside her daughter, both nude, with ruddy complexions and water dripping down their aged bodies. Behind them, two black canines race along the edge of a lake, imbuing the scenery with an undercurrent of tension. Mute and stoic, the womer gaze ahead, evoking Gornick's reflection: "We became, my mother and I, all women conditioned by loss, unnerved by lassitude bound together in pity and anger."
