Haribo Kimchi by Jaha Koo is a hybrid show that uses performance, videography, music, robotics, and street food to plumb the depths of the human psyche.
On the surface the show is a celebration of food and the sharing of culture. It brings a slice of Korea in the form of a red-roofed pojangmacha, a late night street snack bar, to the State Theatre Centre and invites two members of the audience to sit and eat as Koo cooks for them. He shares odd stories, just mundane enough to probably be true, from his life. Large screens behind and to the side of the pojangmacha show a combination of professional and home-shot footage that complements the stories.
It would be easy to think no further into the performance and go home talking about the smell of kimchi pancake, but Jaha Koo described this work in the post-show Q&A as his “heaviest,” despite the smiles and jovial atmosphere.
This is due to the show’s exploration of the concept of home. What does home mean to someone who is listed as a “South Korean artist” in Europe but is considered no longer Korean enough in Korea? Where is home to an eel, an animal that spends its entire life travelling?
The stories that Koo tells us while he cooks for the two lucky audience members sat at his bar seem oddly disconnected, but they all reveal a little of what it feels like to be displaced. The point of them is not the plot, which can seem unresolved, but the emotion they convey and how the experiences shaped Koo. His delivery of these stories in his calm voice and thick accent was simple and earnest, he was immediately likeable in his overt politeness and genuine feeling.
Koo said in the Q&A that the piece is about being in a diasporic state: “in our contemporary society people can be diasporic in any situation, for example moving from Sydney to Western Australia.” In a multicultural society like Australia there are so many large and small differences between cultural groups, and Koo has found that the first and most obvious difference is in food. This is especially evident in the choice of food he cooks for his guests: kimchi pancake, seaweed soup, cucumber starter, jelly, and a mixed drink of Korean beer and soju, named somaek. All food that he can find the ingredients for in European supermarkets.
Haribo Kimchi. Photography by Bea Borgers.
Jaha Koo describes himself as primarily a music and videography artist, and there are songs interspersed in the show to complement the stories. The screens show an animated snail, gummy bear, and eel singing along to the highly edited singing voice and techno beats. This is the part that the synopsis was referring to when it described the show as absurdist. They seem to be absurd expansions on the stories, one a gummy bear riffing on the phrase “bliss point” to a techno beat, another an eel singing about its own migratory pattern. The eel itself made an appearance onstage, slithering across the floor and joining in with the song in eerily accurate movements.
Jaha Koo’s show is deeply layered and nuanced almost to the point of obscurity, but not quite. It was evident after the show that everyone in the audience had a slightly different experience, fellow immigrants having the strongest emotional connection. Having emigrated to Australia as a child myself I found that some aspects resonated with me deeply, and others were interesting to view as an outsider to the emotion.
Whatever your experience with displacement and immigration, Haribo Kimchi is sure to be a conversation started in your household, and at the very least will have you googling your nearest Korean restaurant that serves kimchi pancake.