Jaha Koo delivers a whimsical, uplifting show about food and connection in a foreign land.

What links a person to their culture? A common answer from many Singaporeans would undoubtedly be food, not only in the tastes, but the scents, atmospheres, and experiences inexplicably tied to them. In that same vein, with Haribo Kimchi, Korean artist Jaha Koo has also found himself turning to food as both boon and bane, clearly an identity marker for him that others him in a foreign country, yet inextricably offers him comfort amidst it all.

Returning to Singapore after presenting Lolling and Rolling and Cuckoo in 2023, Haribo Kimchi is a quintessentially Jaha Koo work – it lures you in with its ostensibly innocent subject matter, but over time, reveals layers of meaning that tie back to a greater feeling or phenomenon that affects a far greater population. That, alongside an indubitably unique presentation style, mixing up a hodgepodge of music, animatronics, video and performance, showcase a work that is charming and full of potential, but doesn’t quite match the emotional resonance of Koo’s earlier works.

At its heart is a Korean pojangmacha (street food cart) that forms the central image for the entire performance, where Jaha, emerging onstage in an apron, invites two random audience members seated in the aisles to join onstage. He introduces himself briefly, before letting them know that they will spend the entirety of the show onstage, and that they can and will be partaking in a four-course ‘meal’ while getting to enjoy everything the rest of the audience sees through a video feed attached to the cart, not unlike how we watch YouTube videos while we eat.

Jaha prepares food live, where he takes ingredients out of tubs and tupperwares, frying up kimchi pancakes on the spot, with their aroma wafting through the theatre. Even if we’re not onstage eating it, it creates a multi-sensory experience that makes for a rather unusual theatrical experience, while he pours out soju and beer for the two audience members, mixing them into a deadly somaek cocktail, while twin screens on either side of the cart display the Seoul cityscape, intending to transport us all to the Korean capital. Later on, these display other urban spaces and peripheral visuals, better helping us to immerse in the stories and memories Jaha serves us.

Through this setting, it seems that Jaha wants us to understand how such a seemingly common experience in his city of origin can become such an anchor when one feels lost, nostalgic and comforting. While his guests eat, Jaha launches into the show proper, comprising of a series of non-sequitur recounts from his own life. The first of these is how he remembers finding a snail from a head of lettuce from Costco, keeping it as a pet and even naming it ‘Gona’ (after the popular dalgona snack), before finally releasing it into the wild when he notices it increasingly less energetic over the days.

This initial monologue becomes a metaphor for Haribo Kimchi’s overarching themes of displacement and migration, where one can easily fall prey to isolation and loneliness when one finds themselves unable to fully adapt to a foreign land. This is illustrated in Jaha’s next recount, where he faces unimaginable horror when he travels to Berlin, and the 10kg of kimchi his family insists he packs has burst in his suitcase. Rushing to his apartment, he leaves it out on the balcony to air, and returning later, finds that it has begun dripping onto the road outside, with confused Berliners mistaking it for blood from a dead animal carcass due to its smell and colour.

Later on, Jaha also talks about his own hometown in Korea, and the origins of kimchi and process of kimjang, preserving vegetables through fermentation to survive harsh winters, and how culturally significant it is to Korean culture. The juxtaposition of both these stories are a clear indicator of how something that could be so normalised in one culture becomes a source of alienation in another, immediately erasing the pride and importance his grandmother placed in it and replacing it with shame. In a foreign country, not only is one’s place in the world disrupted, but one’s very sense of self is also left shaken, to either assimilate or remain an outcast.

This eventually erupts into something explicitly racist when, upon losing a bag, Jaha rushes to the information counter at a train station, only to be greeted with an officer who tells him to keep his distance out of the ‘garlic’ he can smell on his breath – he recalls eating Haribo gummy bears just moments before. The string of monologues ends off on Jaha musing on the idea of eels, and how mysterious they are – no one has ever seen how eels reproduce in the wild, and about their migration habits just for the sake of spawning and growing, transforming immensely at each stage of their life cycle. Perhaps this too is a reflection on human cycles of adolescence and how no matter how far we go, how much we change, we still find a need to return to our point of origin eventually.

Haribo Kimchi is distinctly less heavy in tone and subject matter than his previous works, and certainly lightens the mood with signature quirks, such as autotuned electronic songs ‘sung’ by snails, gummy bears and eels, complete with bright, colourful backgrounds. But also compared to what he’s capable of, many of these segments and ideas end up as just gimmicks without a strong link to the greater overarching ideas, and no clear emotional anchor to reel us in. These thoughts and monologues are almost stream-of-consciousness, and leave us craving more by the end. Rather than confronting the alienation and grief that simmer beneath the surface, Jaha leans into whimsy, letting animated snails and autotuned songs fill in the emotional gaps instead.

Like its title, Haribo Kimchi feels like a mashup of the saccharine and the fermented, sometimes delightful, sometimes jarring, but never quite blending into something fully satisfying. Jaha Koo’s signature whimsy and layered storytelling are still present, but here they feel more fragmented than focused, with clever visual gags and surreal touches occasionally overshadowing the emotional depth the material hints at. Still, there’s joy to be found in the show’s playfulness and sincerity, and in a theatrical landscape often short on risk, Jaha Koo’s surreal vision and cultural introspection remain a welcome offering, even if this dish doesn’t quite hit the spot.

Photo Credit: Bea Borges

Haribo Kimchi played from 1st to 3rd August 2025 at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. More information available here

The Studios 2025 – Sustenance runs from July to September 2025. Full programme and more information available here

Production Credits

Concept, Text, Direction, Music, Sound & Video Jaha Koo Performance Gona, Haribo, Eel, Jaha Koo & Two Guests  Dramaturgy Dries Douibi Scenography, Research Collaboration & Media Operation Eunkyung Jeong Artistic Advice Pol Heyvaert Technical Coordination Korneel Coessens Technique Bart Huybrechts, Babette Poncelet & Jasse Vergauwe Production Coordination Wim Clapdorp English Proofreading Jason Wrubell  Snail Animation Vincent Lynen Production CAMPO Co-production Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Rideau De Bruxelles, Theater Utrecht, SPRING Festival (Utrecht), Festival d’Automne À Paris, Théâtre De La Bastille (Paris), Tangente St. Pölten – Festival Für Gegenwartskultur, &Espoo Theatre (Espoo), International Summer Festival Kampnagel (Hamburg), Sophiensaele (Berlin), Meet You Festival (Valladolid), Bunker (Ljubljana), National Theatre And Concert Hall Taipei, The Divine Comedy International Theater Festival / Teatr Łaźnia Nowa (Kraków) & Perpodium With the Support of The Taxshelter Of The Belgian Federal Government Via Cronos Invest & The Flemish Government