Jury’s Statement

The winner of the 7th Doosan Artist Award in Performing Arts is the playwright and director Koo Ja-hye. Koo’s 2010 play Dirt Island won a prize at the New Play Festival hosted by Korea National University of Arts, and Koo began to work as a writer-cum-director through the production of her works Waiting Room and Theater Definitely, both written in 2012. Despite her relatively short professional career, Koo’s art world and piercing observation expresses the ontological anxiety of the young generation of people living in the society today, demonstrating eye opening accomplishments with her remarkable growth.

In particular, Commercial, Definitely: Macadamia, Plagiarism, Mers and Mansplain (2015) and its adaptation Commercial, Definitely: Macadamia, Censorship, Apple and Mansplain (2016), performed at Namsan Arts Center, demonstrate an intellectually witty and biting satirical mind rarely seen in the theatrical scene in Korea these days. The audience’s rave for this work is also uncommon in the Korean theater world today. Written between the boundaries of envy and distance from what is ‘hip’, as quoted by the writer, Koo casts a frank look on a young writer’s desires for recognition, while on the other hand demonstrating a self-introspective attitude which discloses the sense of envy which we all have for a long time retained immanently.

The strength of Koo’s work lies in the fact that she is always included in the subject of satire and introspection, and that she is able to use humor and wit in dealing with a serious subject. The delightful and lighthearted revolt in Koo’s work opens up to the play of a new generation.

Another strength in Koo’s work is also that theory does not overpower experience, and that experience does not overwhelm the critical mind. Koo’s work begins with doubt and suspicion.

As a writer and director, Koo’s observation, full of skepticism, remains fixed on our past/present/future, herself and others, and the possibilities and conventions of theater. In her work, a strict distance remains on raised problems and everything one thinks he or she already knows, and this is where begins all formal experimentations on Koo’s play (hybridization of the elements of documentary,  autobiography, monologue confession and chorus).

The element of collaboration between colleagues marks another strength in Koo’s work. The theater group Theater Definitely, formed with actors who participated in the play Theater Definitely, still remains a solid cradle of Koo’s theater world. The theater group consists of actors filled with character, including Park Kyoung-koo, Lee Ri, Jo Kyoung-ran, and Choi Soon-jin, as well as Koo’s classmates from Performing Arts Academy. Koo’s growth might have taken much longer without those who vividly incarnated Koo’s words as if they were their own. Carrying out the endless study, discourse and collaboration based on mutual trust, the young theater group is expected to pave its own new paths as a model of a new form of theater group of the new generation.

_Yijoung Noh, Byeonghun Lee, China Lee