Welcome_2026

0set project

  • A scene from <Welcome_2026>. In a dark interior, a person in a yellow vest sits beside a hair-salon chair, seen from behind. Korean lettering on the back of the vest reads that, as a parent, they cannot give up. The chair's base and black footrest are visible at the left.
  • A scene from <Welcome_2026>. A hand points to a printed notice lying on a wooden table. The notice is densely filled with Korean text, and small wooden name tags rest beside it.
  • A scene from <Welcome_2026>. A person holds a mobile phone in both hands and watches a video. On screen a woman speaks, accompanied by Korean captions and a sign-language interpretation window. A wooden table and headphones are visible behind.
  • A scene from <Welcome_2026>. In a hair salon, a hairdresser in an apron and glasses works on the hair of a customer draped in a yellow gown. On a screen on the wall behind, a person appears mid-interview.
  • A scene from <Welcome_2026>. Outside a dry cleaner's, two people look together at a purple notice held across a plastic-wrapped garment on a hanger. A bear illustration and the shop's name appear at the top of the notice.

ⓒ Hyejeong

  • Director Shin Jae
  • Genre Theater
  • Date 10.20.Tue 7:30pm 10.21.Wed 7:30pm
  • Language Korean
  • Accessibility Captioning, Sign Language Interpretation
  • Rating 7 and over
  • Venue Arko Arts Theater Small Hall
  • Duration 150 min.
  • Premiere 2025 Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival
  • Tickets 30,000 won

 

A greeting that welcomes one another in the world after disaster — “Welcome”

Introduction

“When customers came in, I was supposed to smile and say, ‘Welcome.’ But I couldn’t.”
— From <Welcome_2025>

That year, the shops along that street closed their doors. After the disaster, the shop owners who could no longer return to their ordinary lives left their stores in search of a reason to live, and the truth behind the deaths of those they had lost. In a world where accountability had disappeared, they carried its heavy weight themselves, becoming “bereaved families” who came to greet people in the street.

<Welcome_2026> seeks to open the door of “a certain shop,” where people living in different worlds since the disaster gather the courage to ask after one another. This shop is a place to meet the bereaved families of disaster not as victims of common assumption, but as specific, individual people with many faces. Here, the story of pain surrounding the disaster becomes not the story of “them,” far away, but the story of someone whose next chapter we want to know.

To be curious about someone is to encounter the unexpected faces they carry: the director of a hair salon, a bakery clerk, a pharmacist. In this shop that once welcomed people as a matter of course, now a theater ready to listen to one another’s stories, we hope to meet these unexpected faces—and the stories that continue beyond them. Welcome.

Director

Shin Jae

Since 2017, Shin Jae has run ‘0set project’, a project-based team formed to explore how to be alongside people who carry stories they want to tell and stories that must be heard.

Their recent works include <Welcome_2025>(2025), <Here is Where We Meet>(2025), <One+One+One=Life>(2023), <The Step Not Beyond>(2022), and <Characters>(2022).

Production

0set project

The name 0set is borrowed from the ‘zero’ button on a digital scale, which resets the weight of everything placed on it to ‘zero’. 0set project seeks to place socially and culturally self-evident ‘propositions’ back on the scale to reconsider them through research, interviews, workshops, and documentation, and produces part of that process as performance.

Credits
  • Conception · DirectionShin Jae
  • CastMun Yeonok, Song Haejin and Cast
  • FilmingPark Dongmyeong, Shin Jae
  • EditingPark Dongmyeong, Saehoon
  • Accessibility EditingSaehoon
  • ScenographyBaekgu, Seokundong
  • Sound DesignerDianaband, U Eun
  • Lighting DesignerSeo Gayoung
  • Stage ManagerLee Hyojin
  • Production StaffKim Eunjung, Yang Dae-eun
  • ProducerKim Jini
0set project

The name 0set is borrowed from the ‘zero’ button on a digital scale, which resets the weight of everything placed on it to ‘zero’. 0set project seeks to place socially and culturally self-evident ‘propositions’ back on the scale to reconsider them through research, interviews, workshops, and documentation, and produces part of that process as performance.

  • In this play, the audience does more than sit across from the bereaved families and listen to their stories; they breathe in the gestures and the breath through which ‘we’ and ‘our family’ are conveyed into being, and attune their own breath to that rhythm. In doing so, the audience comes to share not only the wounds of disaster but the new flesh formed by bodies that remember and mourn those wounds. The theater weaves all who gathered inside it into one body.
    — Kang Jeong-seop, Short Review, Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival, 2025
  • Until devastating grief becomes a warm greeting extended to the neighbors, until seemingly small and insignificant memories are transformed into the power of mourning—walking along that unfathomable stretch of time, I find myself thinking again and again about why it matters to remain by someone’s side. Because my neighbor’s well-being is inseparable from my own.
    — Yang Geun-ae, theater critic
  • The stories of those left behind had to be told again and again, yet that repetition cannot be neatly contained within any fixed artistic form. <Welcome> gives voice to bereaved families who have become performers themselves because they could neither let their loved ones go nor avoid letting them go.
    — Jang Giyeong, theater critic