'Squeeze it from your brain, or unleash every AI tool you have'

AI can handle most stage imagery well enough — but a human eye for the world and the imagination to match are what complete the picture

Stage designer Park Dong-woo [Provided by Arts Council Korea]

"You have two projects. Finish one entirely on your own — squeeze it out of your own head. For the other, use every AI tool at your disposal."

The assignment from a 64-year-old master of the stage leaves his university students wide-eyed. It is a glimpse into the playful workshop of scenographer Park Dong-woo — a man who spent his youth in the 1980s pressing pencil and set square to a drafting board, and who now sits before a monitor rendering light for new productions alongside generative AI.

The working environment Park has moved through over four decades is almost unrecognizable from where he started. His career tracks the arc of Korean stage technology itself — from set square to 3D printer, from paint to projected light. Today, research happens online and scale models are cut by machine.

"In the old days, a designer might conceive something at 100 but only 60 of it would make it onto the stage," Park said. "Now the stage goes up exactly as imagined — and the workshop even adds materials the designer never thought of, pushing it to 120." The scale models he donated to the Arko Arts Archive — for the musicals "Empress Myeongseong," "Hero" and "Along with the Gods" — were all made before AI existed.

These days, he uses AI extensively. When working on the National Theater Company of Korea's production "Yeokhaenggi," he enlisted AI as an assistant to capture the texture of light streaming down from above. "It's far faster than struggling through it alone, and it draws better than I do," he said with a laugh. He studies what the AI produces, then revises and revises again. AI also helped him sketch the texture of the stage floor for the same production. His conviction is clear: mastering technology — knowing how to hold its reins and direct it freely — is what it takes to own the stage of the future.

A scene from "Yeokhaenggi," a production by stage designer Park Dong-woo in which a three-ton stage floor is lifted into the air [Provided by the National Theater Company of Korea]

Yet new technology is not always the answer. "Empress Myeongseong" brought in LED panel video for its 25th-anniversary run, only to return to analog for the 30th. It was an experiment by the creative team to keep pace with the age of video — but when the consensus was that the show's soul belonged to analog, they changed course without hesitation. Park's principle on technology is equally firm. "Paint giving way to light is a natural progression," he said, "but light must become a new medium of expression, not merely a substitute for paint."

In 2015, for the Seoul Arts Company's original musical "Along with the Gods," he covered the entire stage floor with LED panels. It was not a lazy swap of a backdrop for a video screen — it was the only way to conjure a hell of fire erupting from the very ground beneath the actors' feet. It was the first time LED had been used on a stage floor in a domestic theater production.

Technology has already surpassed human craftsmanship in many respects. So why must the human designer survive to the end? Park reached without hesitation for the concept of a "boiling point."

"Water has to pass through 100 degrees to boil," he said. "Ideas like the double-inclined rotating stage in 'Empress Myeongseong,' or lifting three tons of floor in 'Yeokhaenggi' — those don't come from combining data. There is a deep artistic process that happens only inside a human mind and sensibility, and any design that cannot reach that point will cede its place to AI."

Reading the times, capturing the individuality of each work — AI is increasingly capable of that much on its own. Artistry, Park argues, must climb one step higher. That is why he gives his students both assignments. The results are, predictably, very different. Even so, he makes them walk both paths — because you have to handle both well before you can combine them. The quality he names as essential for a stage designer is not draftsmanship but "a way of seeing the world, and imagination."

"Just as the printing press replaced the scribe, professions can be displaced by technology," he said. "But weaving that technology into a single space — that is ultimately a human act. Who uses AI? Humans do."

shee@heraldcorp.com