Lee Byoung-bok is a pioneer who paved the way for modern stage art in Korea. She opened a theater café in 1969 to introduce to local theater lovers a variety of ontemporary Western plays, Korean folk dramas, and other original works of the era. Lee humbly calls herself “a backstage clown, ” but during her 40 years at the helm of the Jayu [Freedom] Theater Company, younger-generation theater artists regarded her as their lodestar.

In December 2014, a small party was held to celebrate Lee Byoung-bok’s 90th birthday at her workshop in Jangchung-dong, Seoul. Among the modest gathering of family members and artists, septuagenarian stage actress Son Sook said, “It is your tenacity that has guided theater people like us to persevere in this country. We’ve come this far because you never lost that spirit. For that, we truly thank you.”

Café Theatre and the Jayu Theater Company
Lee Byoung-bok was representative of the Jayu Theater Company for 40 years (1964–2004). Unlike other organizations of its kind, where the artistic director would typically serve as the representative and oversee the creative and administrative affairs, Jayu was led by a costume designer. This was possible due to its unique system of “collective creation.” Throughout its production process, including the selection of plays to be staged, the company collaborates with specialists in various fields. As a specialist in stage costumes and props, Lee actively participated in the process, thereby contributing to the development of stage art and design in Korea.
Jayu was modeled after the French theater ensemble Compagnie Renaud- Barrault, which was led by the couple Madeline Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault. Lee’s working partner was the director Kim Jung-ok, a friend since her student days in France. In the 1960s, the two young artists combined their enthusiasm for theater to found the troupe, but it was difficult to find a good stage at that time in Korea. The members were highly motivated but needed a place to perform on a regular basis. Remembering the small theaters scattered through Montparnasse and along the Seine in Paris, Lee came up with the idea of opening a theater café.
Working with her husband, artist Kwon Ok-youn, she leased a run-down space in Myeong-dong, central Seoul, and began to make renovations. Drawing lines on the floor with chalk, they divided the space into functional areas: the entrance, the stage area, machine room, hall, ticket booth and cloakroom, counter, small bar, restroom, and kitchen. After many days and nights of hard work, Café Theatre was opened in April 1969.
A place where people could enjoy stage performances over drinks, it was the first venue of its kind in Korea. It staged college plays on Mondays, and folk dramas, pansori (traditional narrative song), and puppet plays on Fridays, while the remaining days were reserved for performances by Jayu and other theater companies. The café introduced contemporary Western plays, such as “The Bald Soprano” by Eugène Ionesco and “The Zoo Story” by Edward Albee, and a wide repertoire of acclaimed original Korean plays, including “The Roly Poly on Roller Skates” by Oh Tae-seok, as well as remakes from the 1920s and 1930s. Exposing young people to traditional folk arts, through performances of pansori and puppet plays, and providing the then fledgling theater companies (Jayu, Minye, Gwangjang, Kagyo and Minjung) with a much-needed space to present their works, Café Theatre made a monumental contribution to the little theater movement in Korea. In its heyday, it was also a popular haunt for local arts and culture figures.
While the Jayu Theater Company was one axis of Lee Byoung-bok’s career, which led her to contemplate the meaning of community and collaboration, Café Theatre was another axis which enabled her to devote herself to small theater productions and maintain a dialogue with her audience. The numerous intersections that she has created along these two axes and the crises and tensions which arose around them have encouraged Korean theater artists to pursue their dreams.

Experimental Costumes and Stage Designs
Lee went to France in 1957. In those days, it took a month on a ship to get there. She made the tough decision to leave her three young children in the care of her mother-in-law, not out of her personal ambition to become a world-class costume designer or stage artist but from her desire to support her husband studying art in France. In time, her intellectual background as the graduate of a prestigious university with a major in English literature back home as well as her diligent and determined character led Lee to seek her own career. While assisting her husband in his studies, she spent her free time studying at a tailoring school.
“I was expelled because I ventured into draping when I was supposed to make flat patterns. I was just trying to save time by doing as much as I could, but I ended up dropping out after six months,” Lee recalled. Chagrined, she started to work at a dressmaker’s shop, where her experiences working on evening dresses helped her to develop a sense of stylish tailoring. “A model stripped to her underwear would work with the tailor for hours on end, so that we could cut the cloth to fit on a live model. We would frequently dress the model and have her move about to check the hang of the material and change the design if needed. That was something I would never have learned at school,” she said.
Lee’s experiences in Paris formed the basis for her work when she returned to Korea in 1961. She started to see a piece of clothing not just as an object but a living, breathing thing. In addition, she began to develop her signature style, producing costumes that seemed to be an integral part of the wearer.
With stage settings in which the costumes, props, and other elements achieved perfect harmony, Lee brought the hitherto unknown concept of stage design to Korean theater. In this sense, the presentation of “What Shall We Become?” in 1978 was a sort of milestone. Lee’s artistry continued to flourish in “Evening Primroses” (1982), in which a group of onlookers was represented by cloth puppets with eyeless faces hung from bush clover, and “Flowers Bloom Even on a Windy Day” (1984), where puppets and masks were brought into the foreground.

“Hens Will Do If the Roosters Don’t Crow” (1988) brought Lee widespread acclaim for over 70 costumes made with hanji, or traditional mulberry paper. Paper can express a wide variety of styles in costumes depending on the gluing technique and the layers of raw material. Lee’s paper costumes were tailored to each actor’s physical movements. Distinctly stylized, the costumes highlighted the ritual atmosphere of the performance. The unrealistic costumes made with paper, their subdued tones conveying an old-time elegance, added depth to the time and space depicted on stage.
The wrap-around skirts designed for “Blood Wedding” (1988) to express the common people’s sensibilities, the puffed-up trousers in the shape of Korean earthenware pots in “Birds in Flight against the Setting Sun” (1992), and the funeral hall with an awning built by hanging 400 bolts of hemp cloth across the ceiling and down the backdrop were all products of Lee’s artistic insight and ingenuity. Exploiting shape and texture, Lee created stages that struck a chord with audiences. The culmination of her stage art was the ritual drama “Exorcism for Costumes” (1999), which featured most of the costumes that she had produced over the years, obliterating the boundaries between drama, costumes, and stage design.
A chest of drawers in Lee’s workshop neatly stores all kinds of raw materials for her work, which include empty rice sacks, sheets of yellowed newspaper, twine, plastic film, and leftover scraps of mulberry paper. Even her most elaborate costumes are actually made of household junk. She used dried homegrown sponge gourds to give volume to clothes, and created the insignia on royal robes through repeated experimentation — twisting, attaching, and ironing strands of thread and sheets of plastic film. While using common materials that can be found anywhere, she has developed a strikingly individual approach, without being frustrated by repeated failures and laborious manual tasks. Her experimental attitude has inspired her coworkers in various ways and o numerous occasions.

A regiment of hemp-cloth puppets forms the backdrop for “Blood Wedding.” Especially fond of the play written by Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, Lee Byoung-bok has repeatedly reinterpreted the stage design since the play’s Korean premiere in 1982.

“Good hanji is pretty durable. So, I save the pieces from botched costumes to make masks,” Lee said. “Nothing is just thrown away, since everything can be turned into a great stage prop. The lawn that I once produced for ‘Thieves’ Carnival’ was made with strips of scrap metal. The idea occurred to me when I was passing by a metal workshop, where a sheet of metal was being cut. The leftover strips seemed like soft silk thread, and put together they had a natural volume. I used to collect a load of such junk whenever I went out.” Of all her props, the masks are especially creative. They either have no eyes or just narrow slits, and their crushed noses and crooked mouths look ugly at a glance. But these grotesque masks take on various expressions when seen from different angles, and in this way they reveal the amorphousness that underlies Korean sensibilities.

‘Lee Byoung-bok Is Nowhere’
A decade ago, a unique exhibition was held in Geumgok, Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province, to showcase the stage costumes, props, puppets, and other objects that Lee had created over her 50-year career. The exhibition was not only unusual in character, it had a rather peculiar title, “Lee Byoung-bok Is Nowhere,” a proclamation of her intention to get rid of all the works that she had created over the years.
A collection of works spanning over half a century of an artist’s life constitute valuable materials for art history. But, they may be easily ruined or lost unless appropriate efforts are made to preserve them after the artist’s death. Based on this awareness, Lee’s exhibition was her own protest over the lack of due recognition in Korea for the value of artistic history and documentation. Feeling the sorrow of a mother who has survived her child, she decided to burn all her works. Fortunately, the Museum of Performing Arts was opened in the National Theater of Korea in December 2009. Although the museum is not wholly dedicated to the art of theaterit does house an impressive array of materials on Korean performing arts collected since the 1950s, which are shown to the public through exhibitions and educational programs.
These days, one of Lee’s major concerns is her property in Geumgok, a 6.5-acre compound that includes ten traditional Korean houses. With her husband, who passed away in 2011, she had relocated the buildings from all over the nation. In the 1970s and 1980s, a time of rapid social and economic development in Korea, the urban landscape was drastically transformed. Under the banner of the Saemaul [New Community] Movement, a grand-scale government-led modernization drive, traditional buildings were largely replaced by Western-style structures. In those days, Lee and her husband took keen interest in the preservation of dilapidated traditional homes that were being rapidly replaced by fancy new buildings.
One of the notable buildings in the Geumgok compound is Gungjip (meaning “royal villa”), which was built in the 18th century by King Yeongjo for his youngest daughter, Princess Hwagil. In recognition of its cultural and historical value, the house was designated an Important Folklore Material in 1984. With this historic building at the compound’s center, Lee and her husband relocated other old houses found in Yongin, Gunsan, and elsewhere, while restoring some run-down thatchedroofed houses nearby and rebuilding others. It took them many years to level the grounds, plant trees, and dig streams.
It was in Geumgok that one of Lee’s most memorable works, “Prince Hodong” (1991), was premiered. The stage built on the pond against the backdrop of a historic building was itself a fantastic sight. The outdoor stage, the excellent performance of first-class actresses such as Park Jung-ja and Yoon Seok-hwa, and the exquisite costumes and props all worked together in wondrous harmony. Until today, this performance is cited as a masterpiece culminating modern Korean stage design.

Myung Sook Park Dance Theater’s tribute performance at the opening ceremony of the exhibition “Lee Byoung-bok: Act 3, Scene 3,” held at Arko Arts Theater in 2013. The long lengths of cloth draped naturally and the costumes made of mulberry paper and other symbolic elements of Lee Byoung-bok’s stage design formed an integral part of the dance performance.

“Prince Hodong” marked the finale of the OISTAT (International Organisation of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians) World Congress held in Korea. The performance seemed to attract more attention from other Asian countries than the home audience. Some Chinese and Japanese participants remarked that they were proud to see such a wonderful work produced by fellow Asians. In this regard, Lee said, “Korea is certainly competent in stage design. Our capabilities have been proven many times at the Prague Quadrennial, among other major international events, since the 1990s.” Lee was the first Korean to be awarded a Medal in Costume Design at the Theatre Architecture Competition of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space in 1991, and other stage artists like Shin Sun-hee and Yoon Jung-sup have since followed in her footsteps. Today, many younger Korean stage designers are vying for this prestigious award every year.

Dreams of a ‘Backstage Clown’
For Lee, Geumgok is a beloved place marked with precious moments in her life and career. However, she has found it increasingly difficult to maintain the old buildings in a condition that befits their status as cultural properties. Although the buildings were restored after their relocation, that was now over 40 years ago. All of the buildings are decades or centuries old. To make matters worse, the houses were once ransacked by burglars. On that day, when some of the valuable cultural assets were irrevocably lost, she sat in a stupor under the eaves for a long time. She no longer has the energy to courageously fight back as she did a decade ago with the “Nowhere” exhibition. Her hearing in one ear is almost gone, and she suffers from arthritis in her wrists.
But Lee still goes to Geumgok at every opportunity, if only for chores like weeding or sweeping up leaves, which she has never neglected over the past 50 years. Her devotion to these mundane tasks may reflect her life as a theater artist who works backstage, fussing with the costumes of actors and the sets to the very last moment before the curtain rises. The glory and rapture of the stage would not have been possible without her callused hands and silent support. As opposed to the actors appearing in full view of the audience, Lee has often called herself “a backstage clown.”