10th seminar – Ha-ryul Bae (playwright)

With playwright Ha-ryul Bae, we discussed methods for dramatizing and narrating someone’s specific time. Our initial plan was to listen to each other’s stories about “someone we could not understand.” However, while recalling some unbearable and unacceptable points, we ended up reflecting on ourselves and why the person in question was incomprehensible to “me.” Hae-ryul Bae, who translates the delicate understanding of, or “the act of understanding others” into plays, taught me to question the kind of “understanding” pursued by work done inside and outside an exhibition space and an exhibition itself.
Artworks and exhibitions are like buttons and their holes. Each different kind of button has holes for thread and a needle to pass through. Making buttonholes at certain intervals creates openings through which the buttons and buttonholes become tangled and connected. Rather than perfectly matching, they exist as entities that flexibly tie together. I hope that “this act of understanding” can become ingrained in our exhibition/exhibition space. 

– Miji Lee (DCW 2022)

Every day, we try to understand others through our own language and gestures. However, even I have multiple egos and the one that gets expressed depends on whether the situation is private or public as well as the extent of my affection for the subject. Although I have intuitive feelings about people I don’t understand, it has been a while since I talked about such people from a theoretical viewpoint with others, without any emotion involved.    
No matter either good or bad, the experiences we learn from our fluctuating, unpredictable emotions and words and actions exchanged with others develop one’s character. The effort to understand someone stems from affection or happens by force in a social relationship. Through my personal experiences of slight misunderstandings, stemming from my own words and actions disguised as kindness, I could reaffirm that recognizing the cause and source of emotions forms the basis of mutual understanding and honest linguistic practices. Language developed from self-understanding can become a tool for convincing others and reducing chances of misunderstanding. 
In playwriting, the message is derived from scenes composed of an exchange of words. Usually, I am familiar with texts polished by the play, actors’ voices, and performance, this seminar gave me the opportunity to approach a text as someone involved in the production stage.

– Min Ah Lee (DCW 2022)

We talked about someone that we could not understand. We thought about how to dramatize someone’s personal narrative by turning it into a common narrative and reconstructing their time. As a playwright, Ha-ryul Bae said that he is concerned about whether a story is dramatic enough. If playwright’s concerns are about “enough drama,” what concerns should a curator have? 
Plays differ from movies or exhibitions. It cannot be the same, even if exhibitions attempt to recreate a stage or trigger dramatic incidents and plays emulate an exhibition format by removing the boundary between the stage and audience. What exactly are the differences then? Plays and exhibitions diverge in the context of time. Each takes different approaches to time despite both temporarily occupying a certain space before disappearing. While a play follows the linear temporality of “introduction, development, turn, and conclusion,” exhibitions interfere with the audience’s time in fragments. A play creates and presents a narrative, but an exhibition suggests that viewers create their own narratives from what they see. In other words, a play starts from a text and creates an image while an exhibition begins from a visual artwork and creates a text. The two formats have different starting points but intertangle. 
I return to my initial question. If a playwright is concerned about whether a play is dramatic enough, a curator must ask if the exhibition is sufficiently showing, in images, the text that is or will be generated. 

– Minjoo Lee (DCW 2022)