Professor Choi Young-hwa of Honam University Directs 'Explosion' First Domestic Performance

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Lee Gwan-woo] Honam University announced on the 5th that the play "Explosion," written by Koryo-in playwright Han Jin and directed by Professor Choi Young-hwa of the Department of Media, Video, and Performance, will be staged at the small theater of the Gwangju Culture and Arts Center on the 8th.

Han Jin, a Koryo-in, was active as a playwright at the Kazakhstan Koryo Theater, and seven of his plays were designated as National Archives No. 13 last year.

His work "Explosion" begins with a live broadcast searching for separated families in South Korea and unfolds stories of an elderly man who dismantles unexploded ordnance at a U.S. military artillery range to sell as scrap metal for a living, a "yanggongju" (Korean term for women who worked in bars frequented by U.S. soldiers), a young man who participated in the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement and was captured and tortured to the point of being disfigured, and soldiers.

This work is also the only case among all literary works produced by incarcerated Koryo-in that deals with the Gwangju May 18 Democratization Movement.

This performance is a participant work of the Gwangju Theater Festival by the theater company Jindallaepine, and after meeting with Gwangju citizens, it will be developed as a representative content of the Koryo-in Village along with the Central Asian migration storytelling play "I am a Koryo-in," which was co-produced with the Asia Culture Center through collaborative work with the Koryo-in Village Theater Company 1937.

Professor Choi Young-hwa of Honam University's Department of Media, Video, and Performance, who is also the artistic director of "Koryo-in Village Theater Company 1937," said, "I hope that the hearts of the Koryo-in, who wanted to express and comfort the pain of their homeland and the May 18 event in their own language, will be a time of consolation for the citizens of Gwangju living in the present."

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