A young, faceless woman with dark hair stands in the shower, her skin flushed and glistening with moisture. As beads of 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 confronted her identity as an Asian woman, grappling with racial microaggressions, the isolation and anguish of cultural disorientation, 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.