Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

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).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

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).

Awards (Selected)

Park was selected for the 2024 Chongkundang Yesuljisang.

Originality & Identity

Park Noh-wan focuses on objects and scenes that are marginalized in everyday life—outdated advertisements, discarded items, and awkward, unsettling visuals that often escape aesthetic consideration. Rather than fixating on beauty or formal harmony, he is drawn to moments of visual clumsiness that evoke both aversion and a strange amusement. In his first solo exhibition 《Bland Gestures》 (Space Dimension Variable, 2018), the work Plastic Bag and Mannequin Leg (2019) exemplifies the conflicted emotions of repulsion and self-identification the artist experiences in front of such subjects.

In his second and third solo exhibitions, 《Human Stain》 (Space Willing N Dealing, 2021) and 《Dig Around in Empty Pocket》 (KICHE, 2022), Park explores the presence of things that resist clear categorization or social recognition. He visualizes the identity of subjects that exist in a liminal space—“neither this nor that”—emphasizing their ambiguous cognitive resonance. Rather than depicting the outer appearance of his subjects, he continually seeks to express their affective impressions in increasingly abstract terms.

Style & Contents

Though Park’s practice is centered on painting, his approach subverts traditional modes of representation. He does not render subjects clearly but rather layers, scrapes, smears, and dissolves the surface to create painterly fields embedded with physical traces. His use of materials—watercolor, gum arabic, and ethanol—produces stained, cloudy textures that appear across works like Huge Towel (2022) and the ‘Part of Church Flyer’ (2022) series. These surfaces metaphorically convey feelings that seep in like stains, and reflect the dissonance between mundane realities and idealized desire.

In the 2024 two-person exhibition 《Dark Change》 (Space Willing N Dealing), Park stepped away from figurative subjects to present a series of geometric abstractions. While coarse brushstrokes, scuffed textures, and diluted stains still persist, the referents of emotion and identity are more opaque and condensed. The shift signals a move toward a more autonomous language of form in which the painting itself becomes the primary narrative structure.

Topography & Continuity

Park Noh-wan has consistently explored feelings of self-identification and déjà vu that arise from overlooked objects and scenes found on the street. Rather than assuming a directive role for painting, he positions himself as a sensory mediator—focusing on visualizing the perpetual flux of emotion, cognitive ambiguity, marginality, and the condition of namelessness. His work resists closure, favoring instead an open-ended engagement with the fleeting and the indeterminate.

While his early works were based on relatively concrete subjects—albeit rendered in a blurred, ambiguous manner to provoke critical reflection—his recent practice has moved toward abstraction, with the formal properties of painting becoming the central narrative.

In 2023, Park participated in the group exhibition 《DMZ Exhibition: Checkpoint》 (Yeongang Gallery), where he presented the work Bronze Statues(2023), a piece that merges material sensibility with notions of site-specificity and historical memory. This shift signals a growing expansion of his practice into the realms of regional and political reality.