Songhee Noh (b. 1992) works with a wide range of tangible and intangible archives and spaces as her materials, reconfiguring them into meta-level video works. Through this process, she transforms the status of archival materials and the practice of archiving itself into questions of visual language, systems, and rhythm, thereby introducing new tempos and structures to fixed memories embedded in existing narratives.

Songhee Noh’s practice begins by viewing the archive not as a mere accumulation of materials, but as a “site” that reveals how institutions perceive and frame the world. Grounded in this perspective, she reconstructs and re-records the multiple contexts and structures embedded in archives—both tangible and intangible—from a contemporary point of view.

ince 2020, Noh has produced video works based on extensive tangible and intangible archival materials, collaborating with individuals, artists, and art institutions. Through these projects, she reveals her distinctive approach to video, characterized by shifting perspectives between 3D and 2D.
 
For instance, in the video work The truth is the one that is masked (2021), Noh explores the ways in which dance is recorded, centering on Nam June Paik’s essay “Dance as Software—To Contemporary Dancers,” published in the November 1986 issue of the monthly magazine Dance.
 
Drawing from Paik’s text, Noh considers questions that remain pertinent today: the inherent relationship between dance and video documentation, history as immaterial data, the potential distortions produced through editing and staging, and the compression of time and space. Through this work, she brings these fundamental inquiries—cutting across dance, video, and archival practice—into a contemporary context.

In addition, performance documentation of choreographer Eun-me Ahn and the Daegu City Dance Company’s Sky Pepper (2002–2003) appears throughout the video. While Sky Pepper addressed questions of scale from a perspective of sexuality, Noh’s video brings this issue into the realm of form, linking it to questions of scale within video and 3D spatiotemporal environments.
 
The movement of the video traverses the theater, intersecting the stage as a physical space with archival records that remain as immaterial data. In doing so, the work resists a linear flow of time and instead evokes a new sensibility generated through the collision of multiple temporal layers.

Meanwhile, the work Dia;grams (2022), presented in the group exhibition 《Exhibitions of Floor Plans》 at AVP Lab in 2022, was proposed both as a video work and as an exhibition in itself. Songhee Noh examined elements drawn from curator Seewon Hyun’s academic research—specifically, plates (illustrations) from a scholarly thesis—as autonomous components and situated them within the exhibition space.
 
Whereas plates in academic writing are typically presented as auxiliary tools to aid comprehension of the text or to reinforce the author’s argument, Noh restructured research on exhibitions and floor plans around these plates themselves, arranging them as works within the exhibition space.

The diagram produced for Dia;grams included a bird’s-eye view of the exhibition space at AVP Lab, along with indications of the placement of the works, viewing routes, and scale. Offering an overview of the exhibition’s structure while simultaneously corresponding to the structure of the video, the diagram guides viewers to encounter various ancillary elements derived from the exhibition—such as documentation photographs, video footage, archival texts, and critical writings.

This attempt to restructure the diverse records generated around exhibitions continued in Time Shifting Box (2022), presented later the same year at Art Archives Seoul Museum of Art. In this work, Songhee Noh weaves materials from the Art Archives Seoul Museum of Art into a single narrative through five thematic lenses: “discovery,” “before the exhibition,” “after the exhibition,” “documentation,” and “reproduction.”

Within each box categorized under the five themes are smaller boxes containing documents and objects. The video depicts the infinite cycle of 'question-translation-transformation' in archiving, opening and closing boxes, and unfolding and folding documents. The materials discovered from the collections of two individuals, Yoo Joon-sang and Lim Dong-sik, are connected to artist Nam June Paik and curator Kim Hakryang, and connected by the hand of Songhee Noh scanning the documents.

Meanwhile, in her 2023 solo exhibition 《DIZZY》 at AVP Lab, Songhee Noh newly restructured the relationships between archives and moving images, diagrams and physical space through new works as well as transformed versions of earlier pieces.
 
In this exhibition, the artist treated the venue itself as a material, renovating previously concealed areas and designing an interior architectural structure that materialized the exhibition’s circulation—the path through which viewers encountered the newly produced video work.

In the exhibition 《DIZZY》, archives and the artist’s one-to-multidimensional relationships with them appeared in materialized form, alongside other artifices of the work such as diagrams, recording devices, and storage containers. At the same time, Noh’s inquiry—linking words that begin with “DI” in the dictionary and various fruit-like shapes—unfolded in multidimensional configurations, moving back and forth between digital time and real time, between spaces saturated with materials and entirely different sites where new exhibitions would take place.
 
These “exhibition forms” devised by the artist structured the show as an architectural configuration that anticipates rooms and corridors, scale and movement. Through this process, the archive was transformed into a system and rhythm of a new visual language.

Furthermore, the video work Catwalk (2024), presented at the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale, approaches open data sources as contemporary archives, structuring history while repositioning the present perspective. In this work, Noh focuses on the “bleached sexuality” of Changwon—a state-led planned city fundamentally shaped by growth-oriented logic, developmentalism, and discourses of hygiene.
 
Accordingly, Catwalk, which also refers to inspection lanes inside a factory, unfolds at a fast pace through the perspectives of spayed and neutered cats — who emerge as symbols of the bleached individual — while also centering the data of the crosswalks and sidewalk blocks the blanket the city’s surfaces.

And through the new work Best Television Is Noh Television (2025), presented in 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025》 (DOOSAN Gallery, 2025), Songhee Noh seeks to propose another mode of reading archives by newly connecting physical and digital spaces, as well as past and present.
 
Challenging the assumed accessibility of digital video media as something that can be viewed anytime and anywhere, the artist reconfigures the relationship between the exhibition space and the virtual space within the screen. To this end, the video appropriates the DOOSAN Gallery itself as a newly constructed virtual exhibition space that encompasses her past works in their entirety.

The video leads from the gallery entrance to the setting of a different virtual exhibition, passing by previous video works by the artist on the way-including The truth is the one that is masked (2021) and Time Shifting Box (2022)-along with archival materials from her 2024 solo exhibition 《DIZZY》.
 
The experience created as the real and virtual spaces interact is perceived by the viewer as a world that is heterogeneous yet integrated, posing questions about "where" they are present.

Meanwhile, in the same year, at her solo exhibition 《Shaping the Archives》 held at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Songhee Noh based her work on architectural plans of three sites—hotels, theaters, and exhibition halls—that embodied the desires of Korea’s modernization from the 1970s to the 1990s. Using these plans, she repeatedly drew, cut, and reassembled drawings of the female body to construct new virtual floor plans.
 
These recomposed plans were realized on the gallery floor, unfolding into a single structural scene where video, drawing, and sculpture intersect. In addition, sound compositions created by three musicians—Anda Young, Jang Young-gyu, and Park Daham—function as a rhythmic framework for reading the archive, guiding the audience’s movement and gaze, and allowing the pace and structure of the records to be perceived differently depending on the time of viewing.

In this way, Songhee Noh collaborates with practitioners across diverse fields to dismantle and reconfigure datafied histories labeled as “archives,” proposing new speeds and structures of record-making. This process of reconstruction moves across the spatiotemporal boundaries of reality and virtuality, past and present, encouraging viewers to perceive archived history—often regarded as static—as a fluid and continuously transforming process.

 “Through video, I sought to reveal records of history constructed through such material–immaterial transformations by moving across media.”  (Songhee Noh, from an interview for 《Night on Platform》, the archival project commemorating the 40th anniversary of ARKO Arts Theater)

Songhee Noh earned both her BFA and MFA from the College of Fine Arts at Kyung Hee University. Her solo exhibitions include 《Shaping the Archives》 (Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Seoul, 2025) and 《DIZZY》 (AVP Lab, Seoul, 2023).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2025); the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 《Silent Apple》 (Seongsan Art Hall, Changwon, 2024); the 30th Anniversary Exhibition Celebrating the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 《Every Island Is a Mountain》 (Palazzo Malta – Ordine di Malta, Venice, Italy, 2024); 《Exhibitions of Floor Plans》 (AVP Lab, Seoul, 2022); 《Night on Platform》 (ARKO Arts Theater, Seoul, 2021); and 《2021 DMZ Art & Peace Platform》 (Uni maru, Paju, 2021).

References

• 노송희, Songhee Noh (Artist Website)
• 시청각 랩, [서문] DIZZY (AVP lab, [Preface] DIZZY)
• 아르코 대학로예술극장, 아르코예술극장 개관 40주년 기념 아카이브 프로젝트: 밤의 플랫폼 (ARKO Arts Theater & Daehakro Arts Theater, ARKO Arts Theater 40th Anniversary Archive Project: Night on Platform)
• 서울시립미술관, [작품 설명] 2022 세마피칭: 기록하는 미술관, 기억하는 미래 (Seoul Museum of Art, [Artwork Description] SeMA PITCHING - Art Museum that Archives, Remembering Future)
• 창원조각비엔날레, [작품 설명] 2024 제7회 창원조각비엔날레, 큰 사과가 소리없이 (Changwon Sculpture Biennale, [Artwork Description] The 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2024, Silent Apple)
• 두산아트센터, [서문] 두산아트랩 전시 2025 (DOOSAN Art Center, [Preface] DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025)
• 금천예술공장, [서문] 아카이브 모양 (Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, [Preface] Shaping the Archives)