What a beautiful, thought-provoking performance by GCC and AtoBiz, as part of Fringe 2025’s Korean Season! We follow the memories of a mother named Kyung Ja (Ebada Oh), who works at the Gwangju provincial office in 1980. As we witness the unfolding of these fractured memories with her later-born daughter, an underlying haunting plotline emerges, approaching the nostalgic childhood feeling that exists in the audience’s present/Kyung Ja’s past.
The show opens with one of the actors playing an accordion softly in the background, while handing out cone-shaped cups filled with apple juice (to act as a substitute for wine), and the character of Kyung Ja tidying surfaces near audiences whilst humming a gentle tune. What seems to be a happy setting for Kyung Ja, her daughter Bok Hee, and their three comedic friends (with scenes like Bok Hee having her first tooth falling out, and the mother-daughter duo planting an apple tree), is quickly altered once Bok Hee partakes in the Gwangju Democratic Uprising (1980s) in her adulthood, and soon leaves Kyung Ja behind by herself.
Known as “object theatre”, we witness this magnificent storytelling take place through the utilisation of paper, apples, wind, and light — all of these being ways to visually and metaphorically represent the reconstruction of Kyung Ja’s memories. The Time Painter holds such visually stunning imagery, despite its props appearing simple at first, that makes the show all the more heartwarming.
There is a skilful amount of puppetry from the cast, as they build settings and characters out of paper in front of the audience — live! And even though there is a lack of subtitles in the background of what they say in Korean, it is clear from context clues and their acting in what they are trying to depict to the audience. The stupendous acting is accompanied perfectly by the lighting, with contrasting tones of light and dark as a way to portray a mother’s own feelings when visualling the memory of her child. This visual and audible excellence felt most poignant in the mother and daughter’s heart-to-heart that will always stick with me, through the scene’s absence of noise creating such a large impact as the two discuss that “Everything that disappears is beautiful”.
Image by Wendy Niblock, provided to The Student as press.