In Cuckoo, you stage an unusual dialogue with three rice cookers. How did the idea for this performance come about?
When I was a student in South Korea—which must have been around 2005 or 2007—I wondered whether theatre could exist without actors and actresses. In drama schools, this kind of question wasn’t really asked: we were taught that theatre was first and foremost a human activity, an art of the human that was different in that way from the installations found in the visual arts. But that answer didn’t satisfy me, because my view of contemporary theatre was already strongly influenced by performance art. At the time, we were already living in the digital age. I don’t just mean electronics, but software, programmed to adapt in real time, which had begun to populate our daily lives. I wanted to incorporate these technologies into my artistic practice, to devise a performative gesture that would not rely solely on text or on traditional theatre. A few years later—in 2012—after I had left my country and was living in Amsterdam, I received some bad news: one of my friends had taken his own life. He wasn’t the first. My generation had been deeply affected by the severe economic crisis that hit South Korea in 1997 and led to a dramatic rise in youth suicide rates. That day, I was in my small studio and suddenly felt very isolated. I couldn’t go back home to mourn, I couldn’t do anything. As I was sinking into despair, my rice cooker suddenly rang: it announced that the rice was ready and wished me bon appétit. Strangely, I felt a form of comfort. Today it is completely ordinary to have long conversations with artificial intelligence, but that was not the case at the time. In that moment, I sensed a bond forming between the machine and myself, and this experience gave me the idea of a performance involving a rice cooker that would deal with the crisis, its devastating effects, with those suicides… After all, by constantly keeping society under pressure, doesn’t South Korea resemble a giant pressure cooker? Mine was even capable of singing. I asked a programmer to hack the machine’s hardware and transform it into a live performer.
This show is part of the Hamartia Trilogy, which also includes Lolling and Rolling and The History of Korean Western Theatre. What is the thread running through this trilogy, whose different parts seem to take such dissimilar subjects?
The Hamartia Trilogy is a reflection on imperialism and its different forms: linguistic imperialism in Lolling and Rolling, economic imperialism in Cuckoo, and cultural imperialism in The History of Korean Western Theatre. Cuckoo, which I created in 2017, revisits twenty years of Korean history since 1997, moving back and forth between history and my personal life. Following the economic crisis at the end of the 1990s, South Korea was placed under the administration of the International Monetary Fund, accelerating the country’s shift toward a neoliberal economy. The Korean market was devoured by international finance. I grew up in a violent and corrupt society, under constant pressure, marked by a deep sense of malaise of which young people were the first victims. My performances belong to a form of political theatre in the sense that they develop a critical perspective on contemporary issues, tracing them back in order to find their origins. When I create a project, I usually immerse myself in a long field investigation before writing anything. My research always moves from the individual towards broader history. I collect intimate facts from which I try to reconstruct a kind of collective consciousness.
You left the Republic of Korea to settle in Europe. You currently live in Belgium. What made you decide to leave your birth country?
When I was in Korea, I was studying theatre theory. I was doing research, writing a thesis and articles for academic journals. At the same time, I was already a musician and was making my own videos. I wanted to become a multimedia artist and make a living from my art. I was drawn to performance. I wanted to appear on stage while developing a transdisciplinary theatrical practice. I created my first performances, but I struggled to find my place because the Korean scene at the time was very conservative. In secondary school, I remember composing a song titled “Where is my Confidant?” because I couldn’t find anyone with whom to share my work and my passion. Moreover, both theatre companies and artistic institutions were very hierarchical and authoritarian, reflecting Korean society at large. I found it difficult to create and to thrive in such environments. I decided to leave in order to see the world and broaden my horizons. I went first to Berlin, then to Amsterdam, where I enrolled in the DasArts Master’s program at DAS Theatre. I spent four years in the Netherlands, during which I had time to think about what would become my Hamartia Trilogy. I later moved to Brussels, where I began working professionally within Belgian institutions. Living in Europe gave me a certain distance from which to look at my own country. I was able to compare its problems with those of other countries. I also came to reflect on my identity as a non-European, a cultural exile escaping the conservative and capitalist society of South Korea. My interest in politics naturally merged with the artistic means I was using—performance, music, video, robotics.
Interview conducted by Simon Hatab in April 2026