Koo Ja-ya wins International Ibsen Award, becoming youngest and first Asian recipient

"Perhaps I make theater not because I love it, but because I keep doubting it."

Koo Ja-ya, 42, a performance artist, director and composer, has won the International Ibsen Award, one of the most prestigious honors in world theater. She is the youngest recipient in the award's history and the first from Asia.

According to the performing arts community, Koo received the award and its prize of 2.5 million Norwegian kroner ($263,000) at a ceremony held Saturday night (local time) at the National Theatre of Norway in Oslo.

The award was established in 2007 in honor of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, with the first ceremony held in 2008. It was given annually through 2010 and has since been presented every two years.

Past recipients include globally acclaimed artists such as Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Jon Fosse and Peter Handke. Koo is the first winner from outside the Western world in the award's 18-year history, as well as its youngest ever.

Accepting the award, Koo said she dislikes theater "that clings to past forms while losing touch with the present, that does not listen to how the world we live in is changing." She added: "I want to keep asking what theater should be, who gets to stand on stage and who gets to speak, and whose voices we have yet to hear."

Koo graduated from the Korea National University of Arts before working in electronic music in Berlin's club scene. She later completed a master's degree in contemporary theater at DAS Theatre, part of the Amsterdam University of the Arts in the Netherlands. She has lived in Europe since 2011 and is currently an associate artist at CAMPO, a production theater in Ghent, Belgium.

Her work departs from traditional actor-centered performance, instead weaving together original electronic music, documentary video, text and programmed non-human robotic objects in a form of documentary theater.

She drew particular attention from European critics through the "Hamartia Trilogy," completed over six years beginning in 2014. "Lolling and Rolling" (2015) examined the frenzy surrounding early English-language education; "Cuckoo" (2017) explored the economic anxiety and isolation experienced by South Korean youth in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, structured as a dialogue with three hacked electric rice cookers; and "A History of Western Theater in Korea" (2020) traced how Western theater was transplanted into Korea during the Japanese colonial period, reflecting on the rupture between traditional performance and theatrical identity through the figure of an origami toad. Each work was praised for expanding personal experience into broader structural and social critique. Her 2024 work "Haribo Kimchi" brought a pojangmacha — a Korean street food stall — onto the stage to explore cultural hybridity and diasporic identity through the lens of food culture.

Koo has consistently built her reputation since breaking into the European theater scene. In 2017 she received the Young Artfund Amsterdam (YAA) Foundation Art Award, which supports emerging artists in the Netherlands. In 2020, "A History of Western Theater in Korea" was shortlisted for the BNG Bank Theaterprijs, one of the Netherlands' leading theater prizes.

The jury cited as its selection criterion "the imagination to conceive of theater as a space in between — a space where people can gather to imagine and be inspired by what we do not yet know, in a world that too often divides itself into for and against." Jury chair Ingrid Lorentzen, artistic director of the Norwegian National Ballet, said Koo possesses "the ability to transcend the conventions of ideology and platform," adding that audiences "leave the theater carrying questions."

Koo said she has yet to find an answer to what it means for her to receive the Ibsen Award — "and perhaps I don't need to." She added: "I want to keep questioning the era I live in, and to move not toward the center of a map already drawn, but toward the places not yet mapped."