The insistently repetitive use of sequins - the tacky, glittering, readymade plastic objects that are mass-produced to ornament women's clothing and stage costumes - characterizes Noh Sang-kyoon's canvases, which are concerned with notions of the surface/skin. His trademark use of sequins is also the only apparent link between his work and that of Lee Bul. Lee has often incorporated sequins into her work to critique the oppositional distinction between the man-made and the natural, to supplement the critical force of the question of feminine identity in a male-dominated society, or to investigate notions of women and beauty. Noh, on the other hand, approaches the sequins as a kind of found object that functions as a visual code alluding to the scales of fish, a Christian as well as a universal symbol of sacrifice. To him, fish also represents a personal myth connected to a childhood experience. He recalls: "Once, when I was a child, I nearly drowned. As I struggled in the water, I suddenly realized I could die just as I was, a nobody, a nothing, without any reason, just like a fish." The fish recurs in ancient myths in both the East and the West, including Korean folk paintings, as mentioned previously in reference to Lee's Majestic Splendor. In broad terms, the fish is a psychic being, or a "perpetual motion" endowed with a "heightening power" able to deal with base matters - that is, residing in the unconscious. Due to the close symbolic relationship between the sea and terra mater, or earth, some primitive tribes have held the fish to be sacred. According to some scholars of myths, the fish also represents a mystic "Ship of Life," or the spindle spinning out the cycle of life after the pattern of the lunar zodiac, and thus a cyclic regeneration. In other words, the fish incorporates a variety of meanings, reflecting the many essential facets of its nature. In essence, the character of the fish is twofold: because of its bobbin-like shape, it is a kind of "Bird of the nether regions,"  symbolic of sacrifice and of the relationship between heaven and earth. On the other hand, by virtue of the extraordinary number of its eggs, it is a symbol of fecundity typically associated with the feminine character. Noh Sang-kyoon's fish first appeared in his early realist paintings as a literal object, or a subject matter, swimming in flowing water. Gradually the artist became more concerned with the fundamental questions of what constitutes painting and what art truly is, questions that led him to view the fish in an entirely different context, in terms of its formal structure, shape, and surface patterns. In the process, he discovered a remarkable similarity and parallel between the skin/surface of fish and that of painting. The scales of fish cover and protect the body/flesh of the fish in the same way that paints cover the raw material/body of the canvas. The inherent pictorial qualities of fish scales - the perfect geometric shapes repeated in sequential order, as if in accordance with some regulated rhythm of the waves - was observed by Paul Klee, who conceived all natural images as pictorial signs and symbols. Noh's discovery of the readymade sequins as surrogate scales was quite accidental. Sequins share in many ways the qualities of fish scales: they are both as flat as any of the surface-oriented modernist paintings, and semi-transparent with a shimmering glitter, thus highly susceptible to the effects of changing light. To quote the artist: "The actual object itself which is noticed when we view an object is that which is motionless, stationary, a silence that has been launched into timeless space. This is what I thought of as being the properties of painting as an object. And I thought that such properties were similar to the impression of a fish in water. And as I was working with the notion of the fish, I came upon the sequins which make up my recent work. For the purpose of "creating a closer likeness of the fish," that is, "to render the painting itself as a fish, or as a method of presenting a fish itself,"  he started working with sequins. By using materials and methods typically associated with women's handicraft, he unconsciously disrupts the notion of his own gender identity, his masculinity. The skin-deep lightness and the iridescent surface of the sequins reveal, and are, in effect, a metaphor of the elusive, sensual fabric of contemporary life. If, on the other hand, sequins represent an oppositional metaphor, as the artist has remarked, they would discount any representational capacity of the objecthood of painting. In the beginning, to elucidate the source of his painting, Noh laid down sequins on to the canvas in sequence until they covered the entire surface and delineated the shape of a fish as clearly as possible. In the next stage, the fish became patches of light/color floating in an expansive sea. Noh then shifted to abstract monochromes consisting only of sequential repetitions of sequins/scales, because in order to arrive at the essence of painting/fish, he had to focus on the material aspect, the objecthood of fish/painting.  While the almost obsessively self-generating, cyclic repetition of sequins is reminiscent of, and analogous to, the rhythmic motion of the eternal cycle of cosmic life, the artist notes that, no matter how grand the scale of canvas or how numerous the quantity of sequins, the resulting shape of the canvas cannot escape from the essential form of its unitary constituent -a simple circle. In this respect, his sequin paintings share the characteristics of minimalism. On the other hand, the ever-changing nature of sequins, which varies depending on the angle of vision, magnifies the illusionistic aspects of painting, transforming flat surface planes into three-dimensional volumes. Resembling at times women's breasts or missile warheads, and suggesting at other times a big black hole created by the perpetual motion of concentric circles, the optical illusionism of his canvases disrupts a priori notions of the modernist surface. In this way, he challenges the contradictions and ambivalences between perception and conception, between the real and the illusionary. Most recently, Noh Sang-kyoon has further extended his sequin work to include three-dimensional objects such as readymade Buddhas and mannequins. Specifically, both the figures of Buddha (for believers) and mannequins (for women aspiring to an ideal of beauty) are objects of worship. However, by degrading them to shallow, decorative objects or mere things with scales like a fish, the artist seems to be commenting on both the commercialization of religion and the function of sex. In another context, Noh may be suggesting a discord between the constantly shifting illusion of the statue's surface and the Buddha itself as an object with inherently mystical meaning. Or, coming full circle, it is also possible to read in these latest sequin-covered figures the psychological anxiety that Noh revealed in his earlier works