Yumin Oh

I am a theatre director and project manager from Seoul, Korea. My research centers on performative potentials of ambient environments, grief, and memory—especially how spatial and sonic textures within uncontrolled or site-specific spaces catalyze active engagement between performance and audience. I hold a B.A. in American Studies and Mass Communications, with concentrations in performance, socio-cultural identities, and theatre history.

My artistic practice spans directing, performing, project management, translation, and production across diverse theatrical forms, including recent work on <‘The Cherry Orchard’ by Simon Stone> and <Story of Aesops>. I am passionate about crafting work that defies conventional theatrical boundaries and transforms remembrance and mourning into living, political gestures.

Guided by the transformative force of the ambient and collective remembrance, I seek to create performances that reverberate beyond the moment—offering spaces of healing, disruption, and renewal. As a director, I aim to be a bold storyteller: one who listens deeply, remembers fiercely, and asks,

“So, what are you going to do?”

Project Title: What the Living Do—Shelf Life of Grief and Creation as a Counterforce

Project Description: This project explores the politics of grief and the transformative power of collective remembrance in post-Sewol South Korea. Centered on the 2014 Sewol Ferry Disaster, it interrogates how grief is socially constrained and temporally regulated through what will be termed the “shelf life” of grief and mourning. Drawing on the works of Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Jennifer Doyle, and Lauren Berlant, my aim is to analyze grief as a politically charged affect, shaped by power structures that determine whose pain is publicly recognized and for how long. 

In contrast to societal pressures to “move on,” the project foregrounds how the survivors, bereaved and remembering communities collectively enact grief as a form of resistance through cultural and performative memory practices. Focusing on initiatives by the 4.16 Foundation—such as the Sewol Starlight Walk and the April Theater Festival—the work examines how they mobilize creation as resistance; how embodied acts of remembrance counter erasure and generate new spaces for healing, justice, and collective life. In doing so, this project aims to situate grief not as a passive state, but as a generative counterforce against silencing and forgetting. As part of this exploration, a performative presentation will be offered in memory of those lost, as an act of offering and continued remembrance.

Project Inspiration: What should we do when we face death that makes us feel insignificant? Why should we stop grieving? How does death that renders us powerless divide and polarize us? What legacy does the dead leave us with, and what should the living do with it? What should the living DO; and what if it is the dead who are giving us life?

Academic Interests: Theatre, Memory, Aesthesis, Site-specific Performance, Grief and Healing