ABOUT
Jungran Noh was born on December 28, 1948 in Seoul, Korea. She attended Shin Poong Elementary School in Suwon, and graduated from Ewha Girl’s Middle School and Ewha Girl’s High School in Seoul. She received her BFA (1971) and MFA (1974) from Ewha Women’s University. Her MFA thesis was entitled, “The Reality of the Objects”. She received her second MFA from California State University, Long Beach, California, U.S.A in 1983 during which time she presented her thesis entitled ‘Mindscape’ and a thesis solo exhibition.
She was honored with the ‘Distinguished Alumni Award’ from the College of Fine Arts of California State University, Long Beach, California, in 1991. She also received the Second Prize Award at Long Beach Art Center Open Juried Exhibition, Long Beach, California and Honorable Mention Award at Creative Arts Center of Burbank, California. Noh has had twenty-six solo exhibitions in Korea and the US, and more than fifty group exhibitions in Korea and overseas including the UK, Mexico, Japan and the US.
Noh has lectured at Ewha Women’s University, Duksung Women’s University and Sungshin University as a lecturer. And she was a professor of studio art at Hongik Graduate School of Art.
Her works have been collected by many museums, public organizations, corporations and private collectors, including the National Modern Art Museum (Korea), Seoul Metropolitan Art Museum, Sonje Art Museum, Ilshin Cultural Foundation, Hyundai Securities, LG Electronics, Fursys Head Office, Songdo Celtrion, James Marzo Design (San Francisco), Morton and Lacy Law Firm (San Francisco), Ludwig and Jean Law Firm (San Francisco), and the University of California, Irvine. In total, about fifty public organizations and corporations and more than 200 private collectors possess Noh’s works.
In addition to her prolific career as an artist, Noh is one of the founding members of the Korea Art Foundation of America (KAFA), which was founded in 1988 as a nonprofit foundation in Los Angeles, California. KAFA has provided a stepping-stone for Korean-American artists making their way into the mainstream American art circles. After she returned to Korea in 1993, she has actively participated in Korean tradition heritage preservation campaigns such as “Save the North Village Korean Traditional Style House, SamChongGak” and “Save the Dong-Gang Campaign”.
She has pursued absolute beauty through her paintings by transcending the notion of East and West during her 19-year stay in the United States from 1975 to 1993. She has devoted herself to her work since she returned to Korea. She has shown the series of “Mindscape,” “Mystic Desire” and “Golden Section-Color Plays.” And from 2003, she has shown a series of “Colors Play Sweeping.”
Art critics describe Jungran Noh’s works as follows;
“Emotionally charged and beautifully controlled paintings by a seeker after truth who searching for the beauty balancing yin and yang, material world and mental world, dream and reality.”
“Meditative painting with balancing beauty of opposites”
“Mind Landscape filtered by silence”
“Breathing color tint in melancholy splendor”
“Expression of holy desire through Colors Play”
“Paintings display basic instinct that secretly reveals the emotion of human beings connected to nature by sweeping”
“Resonance with nature through sweeping colors- colors reveal the beauty of sublime”