Jury’s Statement

The recipient of the 4th Doosan Yonkang Artist Awards is playwright and director Kiwoong Sung. Kiwoong Sung’s playwriting and direction are both delicate and exquisite. Consequently, the modifier “strong detail” often follows him. As a playwright, Sung sometimes shows subtlety that is excessive to the point of obstinacy when depicting the mentality of a character and the depth of a situation. These characteristics of Sung’s works are best expressed through the following: not only in the works that reflect his own experiences, such as A 26-Month Soldier (2006), which has the theme of army life, and Too Much Love, Too Many Loves(2012), which has the theme of romantic relationships, but also in works that shed new light on the modern Korean culture of the Japanese occupation period, such as Mr. Kubo the Novelist and His Neighbors in Gyeongseong(2007), Detective Hong in Joseon (2007), Showa 10, Our Joyful Young Days (2008), and A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist (2010).

His continuing creation of works dealing with the writers of the 1930s, including Park Tae-won (pen name Kubo), tells of his persistence with regard to the themes and subjects that he decided to address at one moment in time. It is in this context that, as a director, he frequently translates and directs Hirata Oriza’s works. These steps reveal that he is an artist who undoubtedly has his own tenacity and his own world, and who does not easily sway or attach himself to tendencies or trends with regard to his themes and imagery. Persistent thematic consciousness is a critically important virtue for a creator.

Kiwoong Sung, who majored in Korean Language and Literature in his undergraduate studies, seems to have an especially great affection for Kubo Park Tae-won and modern Joseon. Unusually for a young person, Sung utilizes stage expression that is restrained, natural, and clean to closely unfold the trivial everyday affairs of an individual who is situated in the midst of modern changes. The fact that he has performed this subject in a different form with each time and each work is fascinating. Also, as a director, he is a considerable experimenter. In Mr. Kubo the Novelist and His Neighbors in Gyeongseong, he depicted the scenery of Gyeongseong on stage to appear as if it were within our grasp while mingling the anecdotes of Park Tae-won and his literary friends with the fiction of the novel Riverside Scenery. In Showa 10, Our Joyful Young Days, he delicately reconstructed the pasts of four real-life people, including Park Tae-won, Yi Sang, Jeong In-taek, and Kwon Yeong-hee, within the specific and temporary time of 1935 and premised on data about the individuals. In Mr. Kubo the Novelist and His Neighbors in Gyeongseong, instead of dramatizing Park Tae-won’s novel of the same title, Sung divided up sentences from the novel and had the characters recite them. Further, he inserted images to express the main character’s inner perspective and the hidden side of a situation, as well as to help viewers comprehend the 1930s. Thus, embodying images that Kubo sees and hears while strolling (such as trams and the scenery of Gyeonseong Street) is both a directorial action to allow viewers to feel like they are taking a walk with Kubo and, at the same time, a kind of visualized annotation. Moreover, his affection for the Korean language and his literary sensitivity, as demonstrated in his series of works involving modern theater, are indeed very rare and crucial parts of our world of theater.

Sung’s capability as a director stands out in the following works: Too Much Love, Too Many Loves revitalizes an individual’s trivial love story through various forms such as “confessing”, “presenting”, and “discussing”; A 26-Month Soldier daringly exposes the internal problems of the Korean army through the meticulous mentality of a character; Sunset, Moon dance resents the esoteric world of ideas; and Hirata Oriza’s science drama series reflects a calm but keen critical awareness while great numbers of characters come and go without incident within a limited space. His recent new venture, a collaboration with director Tada Junnosuke (of Tokyo Deathlock), is also promising.

This year, Kiwoong Sung participated in an artist-residency program in Germany with support by Arts Council Korea. He decided on the participating region himself. This reflects that although he is calm and deliberate, he is consistently expanding the realm of his interests. We expect that Sung’s refined sense of playwriting and directing will deepen as a result of his stay in Germany. We eagerly anticipate his future activities, as he carries with him a knowledge of the humanities and a constant spirit of research regarding the language of theater. At the same time, he receives reviews stating that the style of his works is still cannot escape the influence of the style of quiet Japanese plays, and that his attempts to escape that influence creak, as if he were wearing another’s clothes. However, we believe that these trembles are simply a path leading to a higher leap. There is a saying that an artist creates one artwork during his or her lifetime. We expect that as an artist, Kiwoong Sung will construct his own independent, creative world.

_ IlJung Kang  Byeonghun Lee and China Lee