SPAF Associated Artists

25-26 Associated Artists

Kim Jaehoon

An artist sharing contemporary narratives with musical experiments Kim Jaehoon is a musician and director who translates contemporary narratives triggered by different factors into the language of music and the performing arts based on minimalism. He is interested in transformation of tradition in a certain culture amid technological development and experiments staging different elements of music. He works on music, performances and videos in order to form a discourse pursuing diversity in the performing arts scene. His representative works include his albums <ACCOMPANIMENT> (2019) and <S.W.I.M> (2021) (He composed and performed all the pieces.), performances <PNO> (2023) and <Theater 1> (2023) and documentaries <Ghost Box> (2022) and <The Stradivarius and Future of Humans Playing Instruments> (2023).

Bonn Park

Bonn Park, born in 1987 in West-Berlin, Germany, is a German-Korean writer and director. From 2008 he was part of the youth theatre of Volksbühne Berlin. He later studied at the University of Arts Berlin and at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland.

Bonn Park has received many nominations and awards for his work, among them the Innovation award of Heidelberger Stückemarkt 2011, the Else-Lasker-Schülerpreis 2015, the Stückepreis of the Berliner Theatertreffen in 2017, the Friedrich-Luft-Preis 2019. In 2018, he won Show of the Year (ZITTY) for writing and directing the opera <Three Billion Sisters> at Volksbühne Berlin. He was nominated for the Berliner Theatertreffen 2021 for his show <GYMNASIUM> and was most recently awarded the Anna-Seghers-Preis 2023 for his complete work - and others.

Jang Young

Jang Young is a playwright and dramaturg. The one and steady goal of her work is to find out how to reduce people’s pain. Through her theatrical works, she seeks to share insights into multilayered elements constituting people’s lives. To be more specific, she is greatly interested in the possibilities of shifts in consciousness and the transpersonal. Her major plays include <Kyrie> (winner of the 60th Dong-A Theater Awards (category: Best Play)), <Good Monster>, <Fan> and <Trans!>.

Soo-Hyun Hwang

Photo courtesy of KNCDC Soohyun Hwang began her career as a professional dancer before transitioning into choreography, where she has been reinterpreting the norms and sensory layers embedded in dance performance. Her work focuses on the vibrations, breath, and micro-movements of dancers as primary materials, paying particular attention to how subtle changes in the body transfer sensory experiences to the audience. Through this, she expands the experience of dance from ‘watching’ to ‘a sensory community formed through bodily encounters,’ exploring the potential for dance performances to function not only as art but also as social practice.

2022-2024 Associated Artists

Jaha Koo

ⓒ Bea Borgers Jaha Koo is an artist who breaks away from the conventions of traditional theater and experiments with various possibilities and expansions of the theater genre as an independent “theater maker”. The main bases for his work are Brussels and Amsterdam. He is currently working as a resident artist at Art Center CAMPO in Ghent, Belgium. He is focused on exploring politics, history or social issues as his themes. His most notable mid-to-long term project, Hamartia Trilogy, is a project through which he is communicating with audiences around the world.

Byungjun Kwon

ⓒ Park Seungki After starting his career as a singer-songwriter in the early 1990s, Byungjun Kwon has released six albums in genres ranging from alternative rock to minimal house. Since the 2000s, he has been working in various fields including movie soundtracks, fashion shows, dance, theater, and Korean traditional music. In 2005 he moved to the Netherlands and worked as a hardware engineer at STEIM, a research center for the invention of experimental electronic musical instruments. He returned to Korea in 2011, and has been working as a hardware researcher who explores sound while directing and producing new media performances that encompass music, theater and fine arts.

Poongnyun Kim 

Poongnyun Kim has been working as an artist and director for Zakdangmoee since 2016. She is interested in "a world with random coincidences and stories that come out of nowhere and which are completely out of context." In that world, she finds "coincidence, uncertainty, obscurity, fragments, and gaps” and stitches them together in a story to conspire with her friends and communicate with the world. Her major works include <Look at your hol> (2019), <I-scratched-my-knee;-I-feel-my-armpit-prickle> (2020), <Time of Fermentation> (2021) and <Turkish March> (2021)

Jin-yeob Lee

Jin-yeob Lee is Director of the artists collective Elephants Laugh. Her works focus on three keywords: ‘place’, ‘community’, and ‘audience-participation’. Elephants Laugh creates site-specific performances based on stories that belong to communities and places. The collective pursues diverse and unconventional experiments without being limited to certain genres. Such experiments gave birth to ＜Muljil＞ ＜Bodies in the Dark＞ ＜Unseen Turmoil＞ ＜All the Sex I've Ever Had＞, and through these works, she has been communicating with international audiences at numerous festivals around the world.

JUN Inchul 

Jun Inchul was born in Gangneung city located in Gangwon-do province. In 2015, he founded the Theater Company Dolpagu, and since then, he has continued to explore science, space, youth, and gender as the main subjects for creation. He presents the world of characters who are from different generations and classes and have different identities on stage to talk about how "we are connected to each other and live with the same challenges in life.

Sung-Im Her

Sung-Im Her is a choreographer who examines contemporary social issues and boldly portrays them with dynamic yet abstract movements. After graduating from the choreographer course at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S) in Belgium, she has collaborated with Jan Fabre, Les Ballets c de la B, Cie Alias, Abattoir Ferme, Needcompany, etc. As a choreographer, she has been creating works in collaboration with artists from various genres while gaining attention from both the Korean and European dance sectors.