Koo Ja-ha becomes youngest, first Asian winner of Ibsen Award

Performing arts artist, composer and video artist Koo Ja-ha received the International Ibsen Award on Saturday (local time), along with a prize of 2.5 million Norwegian kroner ($263,000), from the Norwegian government.

Koo became the youngest recipient and the first Asian artist to win the International Ibsen Award. The prize was established in 2007 in honor of Norwegian playwright and director Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and has been awarded biennially since 2010.

Unlike other theater prizes such as the Olivier Award, which recognize work from a single season, the Ibsen Award evaluates the overall body of work of an artist or theater company. Past recipients Jon Fosse (2010) and Peter Handke (2014) went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The jury cited as its selection criterion for this year's award "the imagination to conceive of theater as an in-between space — in a world too often divided into for and against — where people can gather to imagine and be inspired by what we do not yet know."

In her acceptance remarks, Koo said she hates theater "that has lost its contemporary sensibility and remains trapped in the forms of the past" and theater "that does not listen to how the world we live in today is changing."

"I may not be someone who makes theater because I love it, but someone who makes theater because I keep doubting it," she said. "I want to keep asking: what should theater be, who gets to stand on stage, who gets to speak, and whose voices have we still not heard?"

Koo graduated from the Korea National University of Arts and has lived and worked in Europe since 2011. She briefly pursued electronic music at a club in Berlin before completing a master's degree in contemporary theater at the Amsterdam University of the Arts in the Netherlands. She currently works as an associate artist at CAMPO, a performing arts institution in Ghent, Belgium.

Her work breaks from the conventions of traditional theater — centered on human performance — by incorporating music, video, text and robotic objects. Her "Hamartia Trilogy," completed over six years beginning in 2014, draws on personal experience to examine linguistic, economic and cultural imperialism in Korean society.

"What does it mean for me to receive the Ibsen Award? I haven't found the answer yet — and perhaps I don't need to," Koo said. "I want to keep questioning the era I live in and move not toward the center of a map already drawn, but toward the places not yet mapped."