In the modern, well travelled and culturally miasmic world, it’s become more and more common for migrants and their children to experience a listless detachment. Welcome to My Room is Yeena Sung’s deeply personal exploration of her own feelings, as someone who moved from South Korea to New York City as a child and has grown up a person caught between two worlds.
To say the show is intimate is an understatement, as the compact play space in Greenside George Street puts the audience right beside her as she plays music, sings and reacts to projected animations and chalk drawings on the stage wall. It’s also a vibrantly emotional journey through her family and fractured moments from her youth, painting a story of her life and the clashes between her desires to be authentically Korean, American Korean, a wannabe white westerner or a difficult fusion of them all.
It’s a resonant and emotional performance and one that’s not hard to get caught up in. While it’s also true that there probably isn’t any insight here that hasn’t been had by displaced souls before, it’s precisely within this universality that the show thrives.
Sung is clearly a great performer, a skilled actress and singer, which makes her laments about pigeonholed Asian actors all the more tragic. But as a piece, this is one that is rooted in idealised hope, but still grounded in practical realism. Perhaps that itself is the very fusion of states that Sung has pined for, and the strength of her art.