After a recent exhibition in Japan, our artist Noh Sang-Hee currently has two new exhibitions in South Korea.
Structure of Silence 
For this solo exhibition at the Lighting Museum in Yangju, Noh Sang Hee continues a body of work that aims for simplicity and prioritizes a sensory experience for its visitors. After exploring societal and even political subjects in his installations, here he relies on the subjectivity and personal experience of each individual in their own way of apprehending space.
It was an artist's memory that guided his intentions: a starry night when he let himself be submerged by the ocean, suddenly experiencing a sense of fullness and bathing in the cosmos. Influenced, among others, by the works of James Turrell, he wanted to recreate the beauty of that moment and sensation by sculpting the spaces of his exhibition with water and light as essential elements: "I simply sought to create beauty; I thought it seemed beautiful, and if the people who see it feel the same way, then I believe I have achieved my goal."
For this exhibition, which aims to subtly convey the intimate structure of silence and the aspirational beauty of emptiness, whether the visitor feels a sense of fullness as if connected to the universe or if the exhibition experience evokes a sweet and warm memory, is more important to the artist than sensitizing them to a particular discourse.
Inaugural Exhibition of the Baekje Cultural Center
Noh Sang-Hee was chosen to design 3 spaces for the Baekje Cultural Center's inauguration. This is a museum with a historical vocation, focusing on the Baekje kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period, which lasted for over half of the 1st millennium AD. Noh Sang Hee chose, through immersive installations, to present his interpretation of this period according to 3 themes and elements: Water, Forest, Thread.
For the first space, Water, the artist drew on one of his pre-existing works to play with the temporality of flow and liquid materiality, evoking the influence of the Geumgang River in the development and power of the Baekje kingdom. For the second space, The Forest, he aimed to create a dreamlike immersion in a pine forest inspired by the historical site of Gomanaru. He staged real pine trees repainted in white, introducing artificial fog and deploying light mapping work, intending to convey the mysticism that the inhabitants of that time attributed to the place. Finally, when the exhibition curator mentioned the existence of a large textile spinning mill in Gongju after the Korean War in the modern era, Noh Sang Hee had the idea for the last space, The Thread, to transpose his previous work titled Karma to weave a link between the ancient history of Baekje and the current city of Gongju. The thread then becomes the visual vector of historical continuity and collective memory.
Two different but resonant approaches: a personal and intimate exhibition, and a museum commission, where the artist continues to pursue his desire to sculpt the sensory perception of his visitors, based on essential elements such as water and light, to invite universal wonder by weaving connections between nature, memory, and collective human experience.
Ronan GOVYS
- Links to the official website of the solo exhibition: Structure of Silence
- Links to the official website of the Inaugural Exhibition of the Baekje Cultural Center