South Korean artist Jaha Koo has won Norway's prestigious International Ibsen Award, receiving 2.5 million kroner (around £200,000) for his innovative stage productions. Koo has become known across Europe for unconventional performances that combine live cooking with robotic performers. On stage, he prepares traditional Korean food alongside talking appliances and automated creatures, using humor and unusual props to examine serious modern themes such as loneliness, cultural identity, and social isolation.
In his touring production, Haribo Kimchi, Koo recreates a pojangmacha—a traditional Korean street-food cart where people gather to eat humble meals and seek comfort. While frying kimchi pancakes for audience members, he shares the stage with singing figures, including a robotic eel that slithers across the floor. Koo explained that the animatronic eel represents the experience of leaving home, pointing to how real eels travel long distances across the world before returning to their birthplace later in life.
The production also explores Koo's personal experience of migration. After moving from South Korea to Europe, he began eating Haribo gummy candies and adopted them as a symbol of personal resilience, which he calls "jelliness." Koo explained that when a gummy bear is pressed, it changes shape but quickly bounces back—a quality he says he needs while living abroad. Although he has spent years in Europe and is now based in Belgium, Koo noted that Europeans still view him primarily as an outsider, while people in South Korea also no longer see him as fully local.
The Oslo award also recognized Koo's earlier breakthrough piece, Cuckoo, which featured three hacked, singing rice cookers that argue among themselves. In contrast to the warmer atmosphere of Haribo Kimchi, Cuckoo looked at the painful aftermath of South Korea's late-1990s financial crisis, linking economic hardship to intense social pressure and personal tragedy. By turning ordinary kitchen devices and meals into poignant stage partners, Koo creates theatrical spaces where audience members can reflect together on difficult shared histories.