Jaha Koo
Jaha Koo's Background and Work
Jaha Koo's music, videos, text, and robotic objects construct his own multidisciplinary performance language on stage, establishing a distinctive hybrid theatrical form. Koo examines how colonial histories and global power structures continue to operate within contemporary institutions, perception, and artistic structures.
Internationally recognised, his long-term project Hamartia Trilogy — Lolling and Rolling (2015), Cuckoo (2017), and The History of Korean Western Theatre (2020) — explores the political landscape, colonial history, and cultural identity of East Asia, revealing the structural forces and inescapable past that shape the present. The trilogy analyses the structures through which colonial legacies persist within cultural, political, and economic systems and organise the contemporary moment. It critically addresses how Western theatrical conventions are received and internalised in non-Western contexts, questioning the historical conditions under which artistic forms are produced and the possibilities of autonomous modernisation.
His recent work Haribo Kimchi, which premiered in June 2024 at Tangente St. Pölten in Austria, addresses cultural assimilation, racialised otherness, and the condition of non-belonging through the lens of food and diasporic experience. The juxtaposition of gummy candy and kimchi exposes conflicting temporalities and historical layers, articulating the tensions and paradoxes inherent in assimilation. Rather than reducing identity to a fixed category, the work investigates resilience under pressure and stages this as the concept of "Jelliness" — a flexible mode of survival that transforms rather than hardens.
He is currently developing Born to be K to be POP in collaboration with LOD muziektheater in Ghent, with a premiere scheduled for early summer 2027. Created together with visual artist and scenographer Eunkyung Jeong, his long-term collaborator of over a decade, the project uses K-pop as an analytical lens to examine the hyper-capitalist structures of global popular culture and the transnational solidarities formed through fandom. It explores the potential of a post-K-pop framework in which music, image production, technology, and performance intersect, confronting power structures that operate across borders and generations.
Hamartia Trilogy and Haribo Kimchi have been widely presented internationally and continue to tour worldwide. JAHA KOO studied Theatre Studies at Korea National University of Arts (BFA, 2011) and completed his MA at DAS Theatre, Amsterdam University of the Arts (2016). He is based in Ghent, Belgium, and is an associate artist of LOD muziektheater, Theater Utrecht, CAMPO, and the Seoul Performing Arts Festival.
The International Ibsen Award 2026 Ceremony
On Saturday 26 September at 8 pm the prestigious International Ibsen Award 2026 will be presented on the National Theatre in Oslo. Minister of Culture Lubna Jaffery will present the award and together with guests from abroad and from across the country we look forward to celebrating the artistry of Jaha Koo.