The set designer who quit his corporate job and spent 40 years redefining the Korean stage

An interview with Park Dong-woo, Hongik University professor and first-generation stage design master

He still remembers the straw mat that stumped him more than any revolving stage

'I always ask: why are we putting on this show, here, now?'

'I work like a poet, a painter and an architect all at once'

Park Dong-woo, a first-generation stage designer and professor in the Department of Performing Arts and the Graduate School of Performing Arts at Hongik University, says he asks the same question before every production: "Why must we stage this performance here, now?" [Provided by Arts Council Korea]

A 3-ton stage floor lifted silently into the air in "Yeokhaenggi." The twilight of the Joseon dynasty swirled through a double-inclined revolving stage in "The Last Empress." A full-scale, 12-meter train burst through a forest of silver birches in "Hero." Hellfire blazed beneath a great wheel of reincarnation in "Along with the Gods." These are the worlds Park Dong-woo has built.

Over four decades, Park — now 64 and a professor at Hongik University — has conjured extraordinary universes on stage. "Sometimes the stage takes shape the moment I close the last page of the script," he said, "but some productions demand an enormous amount of deliberation before anything comes together."

The hardest problem he ever faced was not a revolving stage or a flying set piece. It was a single straw mat in "The Last Empress." In the musical, Empress Myeongseong shares a quiet scene with the crown prince — the future Emperor Sunjong — in a private room, and the mat on the floor became an intractable puzzle. Live theater routinely has stagehands remove props in plain sight, or dims the lights to buy time for a scene change, but Park found both solutions unacceptable.

"I had to get rid of this one mat, and that kind of small detail turns out to be harder on stage than anything else — harder than making a massive revolving stage turn smoothly," he said.

He never found a satisfying answer. He still names that mat-filled room as the one scene he never solved — and it is the reason "The Last Empress" contains exactly one blackout, a device he otherwise despises. "If a film cut to a black screen for 10 to 30 seconds every time the scene changed, what audience would put up with it?" he said. "Unless a blackout is a deliberate directorial choice to give the audience space to think, repeated blackouts are the fault of the people who made the show." He is a craftsman of detail — someone who agonizes over how to remove a single prop without breaking the emotional truth of a scene.

Meeting Park recently at his studio in Seocho-dong, Seoul, he put it plainly: "A stage is not a frozen set. It is a living organism that ignites when the breath of the actor collides with the breath of the audience."

The same 'Hamlet,' but never the same stage

For Park, every stage is its own world. He made his debut in 1987 with "Soop Sokeui Bang," a production by theater company Sanwoollim, and has since created more than 400 productions. A stage, in his view, is never merely a backdrop erected behind a script. It is a "field of metaphor" where an audience and its era collide and catch fire. Whether he is cutting through brutal history, venturing into unknown worlds or weaving the texture of ordinary life, his starting point is always the same: the script.

"I begin designing by asking how I can best convey the work's central theme," Park said. The aesthetic he pursues shifts with every production. "Sometimes a realistic stage communicates more powerfully; other times a work only reaches its full depth when it speaks symbolically." The former describes the play "Sanbul," a Korean drama set during the Korean War; the latter, "The Last Empress." The approach may differ, but the question driving it never changes.

"Why must we stage this performance here, now?"

Stage designer Park Dong-woo, who has been responsible for hundreds of productions over the past 40 years, including "The Last Empress," "Hero" and "Along with the Gods" [Provided by Arts Council Korea]

"Whether it is Shakespeare from 400 years ago or Greek tragedy from 2,500 years ago, the most important thing is making it meet today's audience," Park said. "That is why the same 'Hamlet' demands a different stage depending on when you stage it." The two productions of "Hamlet" he has designed shared the same text but were born as entirely different organisms, each breathing in step with its own era.

His 2016 production at the National Theater of Korea's Haeoreum Grand Theater placed 600 audience seats on the stage itself — a move still cited as one of the boldest choices in recent Korean theater. "The audience watched the play from the stage, and after the final scene they had to walk across the empty house to leave the theater," he recalled. Staged to mark the centenary of theater director Lee Hae-rang's birth, the production proved in spatial terms the theatrical truth that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

His 2022 "Hamlet," by contrast, used a mirror-smooth floor and soaring steel walls to project the overwhelming power of the usurper Claudius, with a graveyard of black earth stretching behind them — a symbol of the helpless solitude of young Hamlet standing before unjust power, and of the equality that death imposes on all. "I am always studying, always paying attention, always keeping my senses sharp," Park said. "Artists who lose the ability to read their times will decline."

Drawing images not on the retina, but in the mind

In 1995, Park was eight years into his career — still considered a relative newcomer in the industry. Yet Yun Ho-jin, the artistic director of Acom and one of the towering figures of Korean musical theater, entrusted him with the stage design for the landmark musical "The Last Empress."

The tool he reached for was symbolism. For Park, a stage is not a space of mechanical reproduction that transplants reality onto a platform. Even when he opts for realistic representation, his eye is always trained on depth of meaning. Render something too concretely, he believes, and imagination stops; throw the audience a symbol that distills the essence, and they "expand an infinite universe inside their own minds." The clearest example in "The Last Empress": instead of the massive wooden columns of Gyeongbokgung's Geunjeongjeon throne hall, he hung curtains of reed blinds washed in the crimson of a dying sunset.

"It was the twilight of Joseon collapsing just before nightfall — and the fury at Japanese atrocities," he said. "If you project realistic-looking columns with LED, they carry exactly one meaning: the columns of Gyeongbokgung. But when you see red blinds filtering light and shadow, you can complete the emotion of a nation crumbling to its fate."

The blood-oath scene in a birch forest from the musical "Hero" [Provided by Acom]

In "The Last Empress," Park engraved the Joseon celestial map "Cheonsang Yeolcha Bunyajido" into the stage floor and combined it with a double-inclined revolving stage to render the swirling tragedy of the late Joseon era. He also rigged the royal throne to rise instantly whenever a court scene demanded it — each choice a fusion of symbol and function. "On stage, symbolism alone is not enough," he said. "The symbol has to satisfy the functional requirements as well."

For the musical "Hero," he set aside an early script that opened with the ghost of Ito Hirobumi inside a prison cell and instead placed a pristine birch forest on the Vladivostok steppe at the very front of the stage. The image came from a research trip he made to Harbin and Vladivostok in search of the work's roots.

"When the plane landed at Vladivostok airport, I looked out the window and saw the Siberian birch forest stretching endlessly in every direction," he said. "Seeing those white trees standing straight in the bitter cold, I was certain: that forest is the spirit of the independence fighters."

The scene became one of the defining images of "Hero," lending a sublime quality to the blood-oath ceremony of Ahn Jung-geun and his comrades. "Giving the audience a picture to look at is not the goal," Park said. "Drawing a picture inside the audience's mind — that is what I truly mean by symbolism."

The Daewoo man who quit — and spent 40 years as poet, painter and architect

He has spent 40 years on the stage, but he arrived there by a long detour. Growing up in Cheongsong, North Gyeongsang Province, where "there was nothing much to do except read," he dreamed as a child of becoming a novelist. His favorite writer was the late novelist Choi In-ho (1945–2013). He also drew from an early age and harbored ambitions of becoming an architect — a discipline he saw, as Michelangelo did, as belonging to the realm of fine art. But a college entrance system that docked 15 points from humanities students who applied to science programs pushed him in a different direction.

The turning point came during his gap year, when he passed the Daewoo Building near Seoul Station — now Seoul Square — every day. At 19, he looked up to Daewoo Group Chairman Kim Woo-jung as a role model. He followed through: after graduating from Yonsei University with a degree in business administration, he went straight to work at Daewoo.

But life as an elite office worker was not what he had imagined. Creative work was out of the question for a new hire. He spent every day asking himself what he was really supposed to be doing. When the restlessness became unbearable, memories of designing nearly 20 sets for his university theater club came flooding back — and after just a year and a half at the company, he handed in his resignation without hesitation. "When I said I wanted to do stage design, my colleagues would ask, 'You mean painting theater signs?'" he recalled with a laugh. The concept of a full-time stage designer barely existed at the time.

"There was no guarantee it could ever become a profession, but I started with the conviction that I would make it my profession — that I would live as a full-time designer," he said.

He went on to study stage design at the Hongik University Graduate School and swept every major stage design award in Korea — including the Lee Hae-rang Theater Award, the first time a designer had ever won it. He also directs, but stage design remains his foundation. He defines the stage designer as "a poet, a painter and an architect": working like a poet who distills the defining questions of an era, like a painter who gives that thinking a visual form, and like an architect who builds a stage from millimeter-precise blueprints.

At the end of that precise process, the actor is always the destination. No matter how overwhelming a stage may be, if it makes the actor uncomfortable or obstructs their entrances and exits, it has failed. "The true owner of the stage is the actor, who meets the audience flesh to flesh," he said. "A good stage goes beyond passive consideration — a single step or a slope should draw out the actor's energy and performance. It must be a living platform."

He has become a role model himself, but compromise is still not in his vocabulary. He keeps seeking new challenges and sharpening his instinct for innovation, and he urges his students to hold onto passion and a spirit of experimentation. The moment an artist settles into doing things the way they have always been done, art stops. After hundreds of productions, he still says he does not feel like someone who has been at this for a long time — and he smiles the smile of the young man he was 40 years ago.

"The job title is the same, but I have never once repeated the same work. Every time, I encounter a completely different play and human beings from a different era. I think of it as always doing something new."

shee@heraldcorp.com