Welcome (back) // Kunstwerk with Eunji Lim
A new era of newsletter, craft & dream with actress Eunji Lim
Helllllooooo! Yes, it’s me, returning to your inboxes dear subscribers, albeit under a different name.
When I first started a newsletter, it was on the advice of Shai who suggested that I try my hand at the editorial impulse in a low-stakes way. Thus, I always thought of High Noon as a publication, extant in its aims and subject matter; a digital magazine, if you will, more than a newsletter. So, following that same line of thinking, it’s my pleasure to introduce Exquisite Corpse, the newest publication in the SCREMES universe.
Whereas High Noon investigated culture through trend forecasting & analysis and provided a roundup of other content on the Internet, Exquisite Corpse is a conversation series with interesting people involved in interesting projects across disciplines. It takes its name from the surrealist practice and aims to explore similar unexpected connections and perhaps unearth some hidden mysteries we aren’t even expecting to find. I encourage you to read the Exquisite Corpse Manifesto to understand the project more intimately.
As for the 10-month break between the publications, Emily Singer wrote eloquently about a similar hiatus in her own newsletter, Chips + Dips. Not that our experience is identical, but I cosign much of this piece and would rather leave it at that.
Thank you all for hanging on during this transitional period and for being here for the new publication. I look forward to following the threads and discovering where they lead. For the first issue of Exquisite Corpse, I spoke with Eunji Lim, who makes theatre in New York City. Read on, dear compatriot, read on…
I met Eunji Lim earlier this month at the year’s final performance of Matthew Gasda’s new play Dimes Square. In the show, Eunji plays Bora, a freelance cinematographer who is involved with the play’s ~milieu~ of characters via Terry, a naval-gazing and pompous filmmaker who Bora works with. While Terry seems more interested in maintaining his status within the circle as the brilliant and (somewhat knowingly) self-absorbed auteur, Bora is committed to her craft.
I enjoy identifying the details of craft within a performance, much as I derive pleasure from the details of joinery in woodworking or the quality of embroidery in a garment — anywhere the mark of handiwork (of craft) can be seen. I struck up a conversation after the show with Eunji precisely for this reason. When Bora first arrives at the apartment where the play is set, she is coming from a day of shooting, with a backpack and dressed as if perhaps she had cycled there. Eunji creates a moment — a turn — by taking off the overshirt Bora comes in wearing and settling into a chair across from Terry while the rest of the group is drinking and smoking offstage, on the roof.
This moment — the subtle shift in costuming and body language and the way Eunji occupies the space — cements Bora’s position and point of view within the extended group and establishes an essential element of her character: confidence in her creative output that is lacking in most of the other characters in the show. Unlike trust fund baby poet Iris or power player novelist Dave, whose displays of confidence through bravado or coquettishness focus more on their social position in the milieu, betraying underlying diffidence in the quality of their creative work, Bora understands that socialization is essential to professional advancement in New York, even if it is at times unpleasant. She also understands that the stakes for her are higher than most (though not all) of the other characters in the show.
Like Bora, Eunji lives and works in New York, far from her family in Korea. Analysing Bora’s motivations, Eunji tells me “She is working for this project [i.e. Terry’s film] and not putting her heart in it; for her it’s just a job, but Terry wants her to put her heart in it.” Bora is a craftswoman, an artisan, whereas Terry demands emotion from creative work. I asked Eunji whether she saw her own work — acting — as more of an art or more of a craft. In Seoul as a teenager, she admits (that word choice betrays only my own state of mind, not hers) a desire to “be a world star.” Acting came into Eunji’s life in a roundabout way. “I wanted to be a singer at first.” She looked up to the K-Pop star Rain and envisioned herself dazzling on world stages. “I was the spirit who wanted to be a star when I was young.”
But in University in Seoul, Eunji first pursued a directing course because it allowed for a broader grasp of the world of theatre and performance. The course offered acting classes as well and these invigorated Eunji, delighting her impulse to perform, so she made the switch to a program focused on acting. Along the way, with input from mentors, Eunji developed a more nuanced attitude toward acting, one that went beyond just wanting to be a star. It was at that point that she truly began honing her craft and developing an affinity for the intimacy of theatre.
She tells me about loving theatre that “echoes.” When engaging with a play, either as audience member or actor, she likes to ask. “What was the objective of that moment? What kind of message and story do they want me to get?” Theatrical power lies in large part in the connection between actor and audience. In this small way, it is an artform that invites collaboration. “If you watch a movie, you can experience those moments, but it’s totally different, you cannot really feel that.” There can be no response, no two-way street, like there can in theatre.
In another moment of Dimes Square that resounds, Bora reaches a breaking point of frustration with the night’s antics, with another character Stefan, with her situation in New York, and in an outburst, switches from English to Korean. Gasda’s script apparently allows for a fair bit of improvisation, including for whatever actor plays Bora to explore this outburst in her mother tongue. “Matthew [Gasda] gave me a freedom to express who I am. When you get really emotional, it’s so hard to articulate in a different language. When I’m sad, when I feel angry or frustrated, it’s so hard to speak in English.”
I was curious to hear about other multilingual theater work Eunji had done. I love Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car and have been curious to find multilingual theater like the production of Uncle Vanya at the center of that film. Prior to Dimes Square, Eunji played in two shows that featured multilingual dialogue — Specially Processed American Me by Jamie Sunwoo and The Legend of the Waitress and the Robber, the latter of which featured dialogue in both Korean and English and projected subtitles in the opposite language. “Whenever I find a play like that where I can use my mother tongue, I love it because it gives me the joy and freedom to really speak.”
Projections, such as those in The Legend of the Waitress and the Robber, are nothing new to theatre and in fact, tech has always, in some form, been part of theatre, but Eunji foresees more experimental performance work in which we actually collaborate with technology to create new versions of immersive theatre. “Because of technology, there are so many things we can experiment with and so many ways experimental theatre can expand.” While also not new per se, there is a growing interest in theatre that envelops the audience, whether through technology like The Legend of the Waitress and the Robber; spatial immersion like Sleep No More at The McKittrick Hotel; audience engagement like in Soft by Donja Love at MCC or Fat Ham by James Ijames at The Public; or even in the simple act of bringing a more traditionally-wrought show with no audience interaction, like Dimes Square, off of the stage and into unexpected locations — lofts, bars, galleries. In a way, these ‘trends’ reflect the collaborative nature of the earliest oral traditions and the evolution of theatre as we understand it.
Eunji Recommends
While I don’t envision Exquisite Corpse to be a recommendations newsletter, I can’t help but be curious about what interesting people are into. I asked Eunji if she had any recommendations — an open-ended question — and her response delighted me. “If it can be abstract, I think you must have Dream,” she said. Dream has been a motivation to keep moving forward and evolving “It can be heavy, it can be really light, but I think it’s a really delicious thing to have in your life that can change the quality of your life. It can be salty, it can be spicy, it can be very sweet sometimes, but it’s something that makes me feel like I’m alive because of that.”
So go forth with Dream and follow Eunji’s future projects via her website, eunjilim.com. (No social media — so chic!)
Until next time,
xoxo scremes