Jury’s Statement

The four judges in the Performing Arts category of the 17th DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Awards in 2026 have selected artist and director Sanghoon Kim as this year’s recipient.

As an artist and director with the collective ummeeeonn, Sanghoon Kim has shown a prolific passion for creation, presenting several works each year. His bold experiments have pushed the boundaries of the theater medium to their very limits. He has been warmly received by fellow artists as one of the most active young creators and as someone whose subversive work boasts some of the most unexpected humor.

Kim’s work today is a vivid record of provocation and subversiveness by an artist who has refused to confine himself to the traditional spaces and practices of the theater. In his series Non-theatre, he posed fundamental questions about the theater’s raison d’être. Today, he has been broadening the scope of that question into the technological realms of digital spaces, AR technology, and video platforms. In works such as YouTube for Hirata Oriza(2024), Swipe!(2025), and Waiting for Totality(2026), he has exhibited a deep wellspring of creativity through his ironical explorations of theatricality in a contemporary landscape where the boundary between the real and virtual has faded. His bold technical experiments and conceptual rigor transfer spectators from passive viewers into the agents of a new aesthetic sensory experience.

In addition to his directing capabilities, another great strength of Kim’s is the sense his work gives of his profound considerations as an artist. He has embarked on a new investigation of contemporary theater based on a strategy of “multiple speaking,” in which theatrical classics such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Ionesco’s Exit the King are rewritten in today’s theatric and technical language. In his futurist series Pigeon Walking (2022), Animal of Future(2023), and Love Me Tomorrow(2025), he has shown manifold cosmic networks in which objects and people are entangled on equal terms and presented “organic networks” of interaction beyond boundaries of human beings, objects, and viruses. In the process, he has pursued a post-humanist form of interrogation and experimentation. Kim has also engaged in bold collaborations with other fields, including the sound group dianaband and the Japanese theater company Dr. Holiday Laboratory. With Reed Field Education (2026), he broadened the boundaries of theater and raised hopes for a new kind of language and physicality.

As a creator, Sanghoon Kim has inspired a sense of stable expectations with his adherence to his own perspective and pace whatever the circumstances—as an artist who “does what Sanghoon Kim does.” Yet he has also warmly shared his own concerns and suggestions.

While his experiments are meaningful in the sense of developing an audience beyond capitalism, they also raise concerns that they might remain restricted to insular community theaters targeting only a limited demographic—or that they might not “meet the viewers where they are.”An artist can explore all the more deeply when they have a more open and flexible stance toward communication with the world. Kim herself has remarked on his concerns about self-copying amid his recent theatrical experiments, and there have been comments on the variability among his creations.We look forward to him building stronger substance as he looks deeper inside himself in the process of internalizing the world’s different reactions.

The jury for the 17th DOOSAN Yonkang Art Award Brochure download(click)