Noh Choong Hyun 노충현

Noh Choong Hyun is a Korean painter whose work takes the story of family and domestic life as its central subject. Drawing on the traditional Korean painting technique of yeobaek — the deliberate use of empty space — he renders his own home and family in vivid color and varied technique while leaving the rest of the canvas bare, so that the viewer's attention stays fixed on the work's narrative. His process begins with a heavily built-up ground: canvas stretched over a panel, then layered repeatedly with a mixture of stone powder and gesso applied with a palette knife and sanded down, before he sketches a composition centered on a house and builds it up in acrylic. To construct the stories of the house and its inhabitants, he gathers printed material and images, then works them into the painting through collage or direct rendering — a process in which disparate found images, drawn from different eras and forms, lose their sense of foreignness and become, within his work, part of a single story entirely his own. The result carries both a heightened, collage-like visual completeness and a hint of Pop Art. Over a career including 38 solo and 4 two-person exhibitions, his work has been shown at venues including the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Gyeongnam Provincial Art Museum, and a 2011 exhibition in Chennai, India, and he completed a residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Goyang studio in 2006.