Jury’s Statement

Jury's Statement, The 14^th DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards in Performing Art

The three members of the 14^th DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards jury announce playwright and director Ojin Lee as the winner of the 2023 DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards in the Performing Arts.

Director Ojin Lee (born 1986) began her career as a member of "Tiger Power Theater," a feminist playwright group. Albeit starting as a playwright, Lee successfully established herself as a director, going beyond translating her scripts into plays on stage and discovering unique directing methodologies. Lee transforms the theater from a site of representation into a place of experiential and sensory exchange, where the creator experiences the specific situations of each character or scene firsthand and delivers such experience to the audience. This method of directing was first attempted in Hyein’s Obsession with the Korean Church's Youth Group (2021) and Call Time (2022) and then successfully mastered in Dance Nation (2023). How this methodology will expand and evolve moving forward is of great anticipation.

Above all, in the recent trend of performance art where the artist's worldview is authentically and without alteration projected onto the form and content of the work, from which the experiential, individual, and subjective reactions lead to the question "what is theater?", what differentiates Ojin Lee is her exceptional ability to forgo the singular perspective as a creator and approach her work with objectivity, from the perspective of the audience. For instance, Hyein’s Obsession with the Korean Church's Youth Group (2021), the piece that elevated Lee's profile as a director, showcases a female narrator but, instead of limiting itself to feminist narratives, expands into a story that everyone can relate to. This piece was evaluated as "transforming feminism, often misunderstood to be exclusive, into a topic relevant to a wider audience by embracing stories about diverse humans in each scene." Lee's directing methodology is evident in the use of universal and exoteric language and executed in her modest, sincere, and unpretentious performances.

Overall, Ojin Lee is a rare artist whose sensitivity is exceptional, and continuing to improve, in all aspects of playwriting, directing, and historical understanding. Lee's artisanal skills in working with text prove her ability to direct small and mid-sized theaters. As seen in the recent piece, Dance Nation (2023), Lee is able to work with text and not limit herself to literally representing the content: by using text as a tool to evoke performance art's unique theatricality, Lee presents a nonhierarchical performance necessitated by a postmodernist approach. That is, Lee doesn't simply showcase a postmodern tool or form on stage, nor uses the postmodern zeitgeist merely as material, but demonstrates a balanced ability to analyze text and dramatize it for the theater so that a postmodern worldview is manifest on the stage.

However, the jury must add that while gender and feminism issues are important social topics even outside the theater, a risk exists for a continued practice and its sincere messages to become repetitive. Therefore, the jury encourages the awardee to build upon the creative momentum she has reached today and contemplate methods to expand messages about gender into other forms of alienation, to otherness that includes non-human beings, to reach a wider audience and share a broader range of contemporary issues with them. The jury anticipates that this could require transitions from the traditional playwriting and directing methods―for otherness is not an easy theme to approach through conventional theatrical sensibilities. One must not forget that true art never settles on the stability of established foundations. Instead, it is born from the drive to explore and practice new possibilities as one continues to face forward and open up to what is new.

Nonetheless, if the DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards is intended to stimulate and encourage the creative potential of an artist based on their consistent achievements up to the point of the award, Ojin Lee is undoubtedly the most fitting awardee. The jury is excited to announce Ojin Lee as the winner of the 2023 DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards in the Performing Arts and looks forward to the judges' expectations coming to fruition in Lee's future work.

Ryangwon Kang (Director), Kiran Kim (Critic), Lee Kyung-mi (Critic)