Jury’s Statement

As a writer and director, Yeon Ju Lee's works bring alive on the stage the stories of all those who are alienated and otherized in the Korean society, representing the voices of those who do not have, or are deprived of their share in the world. The alienated subjects represented on the stage are diverse and specific, such as the victims of the Sampoong Department Store collapse and the Sewol ferry disaster, or the disabled, youths, sexual minorities and emotional laborers. Through such groups of people, the plays deliver the repressed sufferings of those who are alienated by the violence and insensitivity of the society that enforces oblivion and intolerance for diversity and difference, and aspire to lead to self-reflective introspection in the audience by collapsing their own insensitivity.

The virtues of Yeon Ju Lee as a director have already been demonstrated in <Waiting for Godot>, which was put on stage for three years from 2010 to 2013 with the disabled theater group Ae-in. 
This work was to help and wait for those who could not voice themselves find their own voices. Lee’s directivity in her art is demonstrated through <You are Me>, written by Lee for the members of the theater group Ae-in, and <Disability, in the 3rd language> (2012-2015), written and directed by Lee, through which the actors were able to talk about their own lives. What Lee directed at was art for public interest, as a means through which to invite the voices of those who are alienated and discriminated upon.
The verbatim play <Censoring the Minority> (2016, 2017) restores the voices of the alienated, or those who lie on the periphery or margins of the ‘normal’ in our society. This work fully demonstrates the ‘context and audience specific nature’ of Lee’s theatrical works. Through this work, she called on the stage all things and people who “stir discomfort in others and whose existence itself is denied”, yet must not remain in silence in order for a society to stay healthy and sustainable. Lee asks why and in what ways our society denies certain things and people. The actors’ utterances are directed right at the audience, and the questions they pose demand delicate emotional and ethical thinking from the audience.
Pursuing delicate and narrative theatricality based on faithful research, Lee focuses on the questions while removing all other theatrical investigations. The narrative is serious, but the stage is kept simple. As a theater artist, Lee fully embodies the ethical responsibility of the play in the society.
The works by Yeon Ju Lee and the theater group The Phone Bell is Ringing question where the new Korean plays find their values, and embody their changes. What we expect from Lee’s plays is not a fancy spectacle or splendid mise-en-scéne. What we can discover in her works, however, is the visions of an artist/group which has strove to share with the audience an ethical attitude towards the socially disadvantaged, as well as their open sensibility that bridges across the endeavors to unify the social community and artistic concepts as an ongoing process.