Rice | 2017 

Monologue Performance, Approx. 10min, FFT Düsseldorf. 

Rice is a monologue performance about a family who never stopped waiting.

One winter, a young man set out to hike the Jiri Mountains and never came home. His family searched every mountain in the south of the country for years, yet found no trace of him. Still, his parents chose to believe he was alive somewhere — that he had built a new life, a family of his own. His mother continues to pray for his health to this day, and each time she asks the same question: whether he has eaten well.

The work lingers on this question. In a time when disappearance could not be spoken of openly, and grief had nowhere public to go, it survived instead inside the most familiar language of Korean care — "Have you eaten?" — a phrase that carries love, worry, and longing all at once. Rice quietly traces how a sorrow never permitted to be mourned aloud settles instead into the rhythms of everyday life, surfacing in the words that remain when everything else has been taken away.

The work is presented in Klinke Kunst Projektraum, Cheer for fears festival 2017.