Language Korean Name Lee Kang-baek Citizenship South Korean | Ethnicity Korean Nationality South Korean Role Playwright | |
Born December 1, 1947 (age 76) ( 1947-12-01 ) Awards PaekSang Arts Award for Best Playwright | ||
Kang Baek Lee (This is the author's preferred Romanization per LTI Korea, or Hangul: 이강백) is a South Korean playwright.
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Life
1947년 12월 1일 (전라북도 전주) Kang Baek Lee was born on December 1, 1947 in Jeonju, Jeollabuk-do, Korea Lee recounts that as a youth he was shocked to discover from French nouveaux romans and Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot that literary works could have unclear plotlines and circular plot structures. His early love for such works highly influenced his own literary productions.
Work
Lee has published roughly thirty dramas, all in the anti-realist style. Lee writes dramas almost exclusively, and most of his work has been staged. This attests to the playwright’s professionalism and dedication to his craft.
Most of Lee’s dramas are fables/allegories. The playwright is superbly talented in employing allegory to critically address social and political problems. While his works are anti-realistic in style, they clearly resonate with social realities. His works occupy a very special place in the Korean dramatic milieu which has generally set a high value on realism.
Many of his early plays use allegory to depict hapless individuals weighed down by the brutal authority of the then-military government, whose regime solidified its power by instilling fear of a North Korean attack into the citizens. As state oppression reached a peak in the late 1970s, Lee used “silent plays,” dramas without words, to reflect the social and political climate of the time.
From the 1980s, Lee’s plays allegorized social conflicts between the “haves” and the “have nots,” or criticized the social leadership’s remorseless greed. Lee’s more recent plays concern themselves less with external social phenomena than exposing the philosophical agony of human life, often explored by contrasting extremely serious characters with extremely easygoing ones.