First things first, tell us a little about yourself, where do you come from personally and artistically, and why dedicate yourself to this work?

I’m a third-generation North Korean, born and raised in Santiago, Chile. I came to New York at the age of 17 and I’ve been in the city with six different kinds of visas since 2000. I began acting in middle school in Chile—we did a bunch of serious plays including Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, Moliere, Strindberg and Ionesco (oddly, no musicals!)—and I began writing plays in college. 9/11 happened during my sophomore year at NYU: I lived in Chinatown and I woke up to the sounds of the second plane crash into the Twin Towers. Ever since then, I’ve been asking myself: what’s the point of writing plays in times of war? I’ve studied peace, playwriting, and started Kyoung’s Pacific Beat—a peacemaking theater company in 2011, to interrogate this question further and promote a culture a peace and nonviolence through the theater. At first, my work was responsive, perhaps reactive, to the political climate in which I came of age as a writer. Eight years later, I’ve done more soul searching about why I continue to do the work, especially when creating peace through the theater sounds like a truly impractical idea. Now, I think the work might actually be about unearthing and healing ancestral and intergenerational trauma. The past three generations of my family have been shaped by Japanese colonization, the Korean War, the division of the Korean peninsula, Park Chung Hee’s dictatorship, the CIA-instilled dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and my own experience immigrating to the US and living through the ongoing War on Terror. I don’t think I have any memories of actually living in peace, I carry war in my bones, and reading the news, I see how the violence doesn’t stop—my home country (Chile) is literally in flames, Korea is still a divided nation in a ceasefire (frozen state of war), conflicts in the Middle East are ongoing, and there’s family separations and shootings happening all over America. So I guess I keep doing this work because I want to imagine and create a more peaceful world than the one I experience.

You were one of the inaugural TMT Institute Fellows when we launched the program in 2014. The Institute is intended to challenge our inherent assumptions about theater and disrupt one’s practice to push the form in radical new directions. Since 2014 what unexpected directions has your work / life taken and how was being a part of the Institute impactful?

Despite my privileged education in playwriting, I actually don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a self-taught director and producer who runs a theater company based on what I’ve learned from other individual artists who make their own work. But back in 2014, I was experiencing total failure – personal, financial, with immigration – so being part of the inaugural TMT Institute was a life saver. Being invited to a space that acknowledged me as an artist, independent from what I produced, completely empowered and liberated me. Many productive things happened during the Institute: we renamed the company a peacemaking theater company following David’s recommendation to be more explicit about our mission; we found a home to premiere TALA (which we had developed but not found a venue for); and we began experimenting with the initial text for PILLOWTALK which, four years later, become our company’s biggest show. But what I did not expect would happen—and for which I’m grateful for every day—is that from a place of total failure and artistic crisis, I found my way back into the room to make the work; to do it without being attached to any specific results, and to allow myself to have the freedom to fail; to do things differently, and to do things just for the fun of making theater, which is something I often forget about, because of all the logistical and financial pressures I experience as a self-producing artist. This makes me feel much better about saying: I don’t know, it’s a mess, it doesn’t make sense, and that’s OK.

So five years have passed and now you are back at TMT as our annual Arts Management Fellows, a position that has been re-structured to support the development of emerging arts managers of color in theater and performance in New York. Why come back to TMT and why is this particular investment in building skills in arts management necessary for you now?

I’m building my arts management skills for multiple reasons. The first is that seven years ago, I was offered an arts management job in a theater company I really admired, but I was warned by the Artistic Director that if I took the job, I’d be working in service of other artists and that I’d probably not be able to make my own work. I turned down the job, ran away from the nonprofit theater, scored a pink unicorn job in the finance sector, and ran my own theater company on a volunteer basis away from the field. While that worked to a certain extent, I think I’ve grown as an artist and I want to make more of an impact in the field, whether it’s in service of my work or the work of others. I feel like this is such a hard time for everyone—but it feels especially tough for artists—so I want to work with and for other artists. Second, I’m a one-man theater organization leading a wonderful ensemble of artists and community partners, but this way of working is not sustainable. It’s financially, emotionally, and humanly impossible for me to keep working like this; I will, perhaps I already have had a mental breakdown from doing all this work on my own. So, while I learn how to collaborate with other people and delegate the many responsibilities I hold for Kyoung’s Pacific Beat, I’m excited to join the Target Margin family and learn how to work as part of a team. I think that’s particularly important to me, because I keep receiving these leadership training opportunities to expand my arts management and leadership skills, but they’re hard to practice when I return to my organization of me, myself, and I. I think I’ve been alienating myself, disconnecting from my community, to the point sometimes I feel like I can’t human anymore. Third, the most meaningful lessons I’ve learned from my past leadership trainings are about rooting myself, my work and my practice in community. As an immigrant artist of color, that means grounding myself in the physical location I call home (Brooklyn), working with communities of color (which Target Margin is doing so intentionally since moving to Sunset Park), and being of service to other artists. Everything Target Margin is doing is something I’d love for Kyoung’s Pacific Beat to grow to do, and because I’m a self-taught practitioner that really learns the craft from working with other artists, I think this is the best way for me to build the skills and tools I need to continue forging my own artistic path.

Let me gas you up a bit: you have an extensive background as a playwright / director (you created / produced work through your own theater company, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat), the recipient of numerous fellowships (including a 2019 / 2020 Dramatist Guild Fellowship), and have sat on various funding panels, which give you multiple perspectives on the state of the field and where the greatest impact of the work can be seen. From your perspective right now what are the biggest challenges individual artists like yourself are facing and what can we do as a community to address / overcome them?

I think the challenges for individual artists have remained the same over the past few, humbling years I’ve been working in the indie theater community. The first is funding; since the NEA Four, funding for individual artists has become less and less available and that problem is structural—it’s to be discussed with the federal government as a national public policy issue. ‘Till then, the lack of public support for the arts leaves a gap to be met by private donors and foundations, which results in the privatization of culture and classicism advancing the aesthetics favored by the privileged, which is problematic. Luckily, I think people have noticed this problem and organizations like the Indie Theater Fund (where I’m a Board member), arts service organizations like ART/NY, and most importantly, NY city public funds are allocating more support for individual artists. The second problem is equity; while there’s more resources available to support EDI work in the field, the reality is that a lot of these resources are given to larger, predominantly white, non-profit organizations to support diverse representation on-stage, without diversifying leadership of arts organization, decision-makers, and audiences. People of color need MORE to participate in the arts, due to the longer-lasting, generational impact of systemic racism, and I think arts organizations, artists, and funders are acknowledging this and taking action. The third challenge is space—I’ve been working in theater since the early 2000’s, and it breaks my heart to see theater companies come and go, especially the ones serving communities of color. I think people say certain theater companies are not meant to last, and certain artists have happily closed down their independent companies and found success doing mainstream, or more commercial theater, but for those who want to stay independent and experimental and weird, I think not having the resources to secure space to do the work is really a deal-breaker, especially as artists become weaponized as agents of gentrification, or the unbearable costs of living in New York City simply drives artists away. I know Target Margin is aware of these challenges and is navigating the delicate balance between making art and being accountable to its community as the company builds its new home in Sunset Park. Learning from Target Margin at this particular moment of its history is, for me, a priceless education. And as an immigrant theater artist unrooted from my homeland, and a queer person of color separated from family, I cannot express how much it means to me to have an artistic home.

What’s next for Kyoung and Kyoung’s Pacific Beat? Projects on the horizons? Dope vacation planned? New cookbook? Tell us, we wanna know!

Kyoung’s Pacific Beat’s next project is NERO, the story of George W. Bush and the War on Terror anachronistically re-told as the story of the rise and fall of Nero’s Roman Empire. NERO is a play I’ve been working on since 2011; it’s a 3.5 hour long, 10 actor play, which has been too ambitious for me to bring to fruition. For the past (wow!) 8 years, I’ve conducted research and done rewrites for readings, in order to clarify for myself what this project is about. I think this is my everything play—a play about peace and war; about the history that has shaped me; my inner conflicts becoming part of the American experiment—which can also be a violent, racist, Empire; and reconciling truth, memory, and history in a way that reflects my post traumatic experience of being alive in these times. Right now, I’m going through research materials I gathered from the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas and doing rewrites as part of my Dramatist Guild Fellowship and next year, I hope to bring my collaborators and community together, so we can start doing work for NERO in the room. As a peacemaking theater artist, I feel like this is an appropriate time to tell the story of a narcissistic tyrant who blissfully plays the lyre as his Empire catches fire.