Park Noh-wan (b. 1987) focuses on subjects that are neither particularly beautiful nor harmonious in form—things that are often overlooked or deemed unimportant, such as outdated advertisements or discarded objects crumpled on the roadside. The artist translates these strangely captivating scenes onto canvas, not by merely depicting their forms, but by capturing the unique atmosphere and emotions they evoke.

Park Noh-wan's first solo exhibition, 《Bland Gestures》, was held in 2018 at Space Variable Dimension. The exhibition showcased works that captured a sense of humor found in seemingly insignificant everyday objects. 
 
He painted scenes such as the awkward face of a promotional mannequin standing inexplicably in front of a restaurant, a distorted Mickey Mouse with misaligned eyes, and a photograph of a boiled egg from a PC café monitor menu. 
 
These clumsy subjects evoked both a sense of aversion and discomfort in the artist while simultaneously inducing a kind of wry amusement. Park Noh-wan observed beings that drift aimlessly, unable to fully assimilate into an accelerated society, and experienced a strange sense of déjà vu and self-identification in the process.

He collected objects that evoked a sense of self-reflection and transferred them onto the canvas. However, rather than being rendered with clarity, these objects appear blurred and muted, with their details intentionally omitted. Additionally, the background and objects within the composition are depicted with equal intensity and technique, blending together without distinct boundaries, creating an ambiguous visual effect. 
 
To reduce the sharpness of forms, Park Noh-wan fills the canvas with objects or scenes using a brush, then lowers the saturation and minimizes shading by layering white paint. He further distresses the surface by rubbing it or dissolving dried paint with gum arabic solution, creating smudges and stains.

Through this process, countless brushstrokes and scratches left by the brush remain visible on the surface. These physical traces reflect an ambivalent desire—both to depict and to erase at the same time. 
 
Unlike traditional painting, which aims to clearly reproduce visible subjects, Park Noh-wan’s works reveal distorted and smudged forms, making it difficult to assign a fixed meaning to them.

Curator Jihyung Park described this as "a physical waypoint where he momentarily postpones affirming his relationship with daily life as an individual and with painting as an artist." In other words, his paintings reflect an attitude of deliberate distance—hesitating to precisely define the fragments of the world he encounters and collects, both as an individual and as an artist.

His second solo exhibition, 《Human Stain》, held in 2021 at Space Willing N Dealing, featured paintings of indistinct human figures rendered in his signature technique. The figures, filling the large-scale canvases, leave an impression of shadowy silhouettes or faded memories, gradually shifting toward abstraction. 
 
The series of paintings presented in the exhibition stemmed from the presence of life-sized sculptures that the artist encountered by chance on the street. Park Noh-wan began tracing human-like traces not only in sculptures resembling the human form but also in objects seemingly distant from it, unraveling their faint echoes of human presence.

The resulting works, though originating from specific subjects, focused less on faithfully depicting their forms and more on capturing their impressions. To convey the sensory essence of his subjects, Park Noh-wan mixed gum arabic with watercolor to create a dense, textured surface. He repeatedly scraped and rubbed the surface using various tools, including brushes. 
 
The physical traces left on the painting’s surface—marks, time, and the materiality of the medium—obscure the original form of the subject but instead reflect the artist’s attempt to confront what lies beyond it.

In Park Noh-wan's third solo exhibition, 《Dig Around in Empty Pocket》, held at KICHE in 2022, the artist presented works that deepened his distinctive approach to experimenting with painting surfaces and textures. The exhibition focused on seemingly insignificant objects—such as worn-out shoes, broken umbrellas, flyers, and church towels—that are often kept and never thrown away. Rather than revealing their origin or narrative, the emphasis was placed on the manner in which they were depicted.
 
The newly presented works in this exhibition involved a technique where the artist first applied a white undercoat made from a mixture of gum arabic powder, watercolor binder, water, paint, and ethanol for drying. The images were then restructured and painted, followed by a process of smearing and distorting. Throughout this process, the artist adjusted the mixture with water, or manipulated the surface using tools like brush rollers, spatulas, and fingertips, gradually shaping the painting.

For example, the work Huge Towel began with the artist's spontaneous thought of creating a large painting using an old towel that had been used for years after being received from somewhere long ago. The artist focused on the stiffened surface and stained marks of the towel, magnifying them across the entire canvas, capturing them as an abstract piece.
 
The painting, which overall carries a pinkish hue, is interspersed with blue stains. Park Noh-wan describes this as "something like dirt, creating a blotchy effect on the painting." The blue stains that have seeped throughout the work give the painting a blurry quality and create an abstract sensibility.

In other works, traces of blue are also seen throughout the paintings. For example, in the series ‘Part of Church Flyer’ (2022), where a section of a church flyer, which had been lying on the street, is transferred onto three canvases side by side like a triptych, blurry blue outlines cross the entire painting.
 
Critic Soyeon Ahn notes that the artist uses the blue outlines to fade the surface of the painting into a hazy, and this technique can be broadly divided into two approaches. One involves mixing the outline with other colors, continuously erasing and wiping it away, while the other involves forcefully pushing the outline of the form into the canvas.
 
The crude and overtly depicted forms of earthly desire for heaven on the flyer become blurred through these techniques, which, by placing them within the context of painting, deliberately highlight the dissonance between a broken reality and a world of salvation.

In 2023, Park Noh-wan began painting statues and monuments discovered around villages near the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) and historical sites. The paintings Bronze Statues (2023) and Stone Statue and Turtle Toy (2023), presented at the 《DMZ Exhibition: Checkpoint》, capture the forms of objects that appear and are interpreted differently depending on the passage of time and changing circumstances observed in the DMZ at the time.
 
Park Noh-wan's technique, which involves painting with watercolor and repeatedly wiping it away, transforms the shapes of objects into messy stains. This method reveals the distorted essence of the subjects, shaped by their surrounding environment and the passage of time.

In this way, Park Noh-wan has translated the subtle cognitive shifts he personally experiences in the midst of fleeting, everyday scenes into his paintings. Meanwhile, in the 2024 two-person exhibition 《Dark Change》 at Space Willing N Dealing, he introduced a new body of work featuring abstract expressions based on geometric shapes, contrasting with his earlier focus on concrete subjects like figures and objects.
 
The exhibition curator asked the artist to imagine what follows after the collapse of the world, and in this process, Park envisioned a bleak future, recalling his own narrative as a figure hinting at the inevitable situations humans would face. This work, which began by imagining a narrative in which the artist places himself in an impending catastrophic situation, is reconfigured through geometric lines that are roughly yet sharply drawn, revealing a deeper level of abstraction.

The subjective insights and observations of everyday encounters, along with the process of emotional engagement and reinterpretation by Park Noh-wan, are expressed through ambiguous forms and unique textures, prompting the audience to engage in serious observation. Rather than describing the form of the image, Park conveys the emotions that can resonate from the image itself, allowing the audience to experience and witness the emotions he felt while observing the subjects through his gaze.
 
What he felt toward the subjects were likely ambiguous emotions—sensations that cannot be clearly identified or expressed in words. These emotions and sensations, which are impossible to articulate with specific and precise language, are translated into countless brushstrokes, scratched marks, repeated smudges, and thick layers of paint on his canvas.

“I often think, ‘I’d rather this not be either this or that,’ which leads to a repetitive motion. I’m also afraid that my decisions might be in vain, and I sometimes wonder if, in the process of making decisions, there was never any deepening emotion or new way of drawing in the first place.
 
It felt like pretending to search through an empty pocket. Even though there’s nothing to show, I thought I could still show the process of digging around the pocket.” (Park Noh-wan, excerpt from Design Press interview, October 27, 2022)

Park Noh-wan majored in painting at Hongik University and received a master's degree at the Department of Fine Arts at Seoul National University of Science and Technology. His solo exhibitions include 《Dig Around in Empty Pocket》 (KICHE, Seoul, 2022), 《Human Stain》 (Space Willing N Dealing, Seoul, 2021), and 《Bland Gestures》 (Space Variable Dimension, Seoul, 2018).
 
Major group exhibitions he has participated in include 《Rubbing Your Name》 (Ilwoo Space, Seoul, 2024), 《Keep Going #2》 (Space Willing N Dealing, Seoul, 2023), 《DMZ Exhibition: Checkpoint》 (Camp Greaves, Paju; Yeongang Gallery, Yeoncheon, 2023), 《You Never Saw It》 (KICHE, Seoul, 2021), 《Light and Crystalline》 (One And J. Gallery, Seoul, 2020), and 《MMMore!》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2019).
 
Additionally, Park Noh-wan was selected for the 2024 Chongkundang Yesuljisang.

References

• 갤러리 기체, 박노완 (KICHE, Park Noh-wan)
• 공간 가변크기, 싱거운 제스처들 (Space Variable Dimension, Bland Gestures)
• 스페이스 윌링앤딜링, 사람 얼룩 (Space Willing N Dealing, Human Stain)
• 리얼디엠지프로젝트, [RDP 2023 / Artist] 박노완 (REAL DMZ PROJECT, [RDP 2023 / Artist] Park Noh-wan) 
• 기체, 텅 빈 주머니를 헤집기 (KICHE, Dig Around in Empty Pocket) 
• 안소연, 오래된 수건은 뻣뻣하다 (Soyeon Ahn, Old Towels are Siff)
• 종근당 예술지상, 박노완 (Chongkundang Yesuljisang, Park Noh-wan)
• 디자인프레스, 그는 왜 텅 빈 주머니를 헤집나?, 2022.10.27