Hakchon hosted numerous concerts and plays, but the musical “Subway Line 1” (1994) became its signature production and was known as a launching pad for many prominent actors. In this photo from a 2003 performance marking the musical’s 2,000th show, Hwang Jung-min, left, then an emerging star, makes a special appearance as a con man who threatens subway passengers by deliberately injuring himself. Hwang first joined the production in 1995.HAKCHON
Kim Myung-hwa The author is a playwright and director.
When Kim Min-ki, an influential singer-songwriter and theater producer who founded and ran Hakchon, died in 2024, the small theater company and venue he had nurtured for decades also came to an end. Some hoped its repertoire, including “Subway Line 1” and “Gochujang Tteokbokki,” would continue there. But neither Kim nor his family wanted his legacy frozen in place or the theater preserved like a museum piece.
Instead, Arts Council Korea, which took over the venue, remodeled it as a theater centered on children, carrying forward Kim’s vision. After a public naming process, it reopened as Arko Kkumbat Theater, with “Kkumbat” meaning “field of dreams.”
I recently saw a family play there that brightened the hearts of adults as well as children. “The Song of a Grain of Rice” (2026), written and directed by Lee Si-won, dramatizes where the rice on our tables comes from, tracing a seed from a nursery bed to a rice plant in the fields.
Unlike family plays centered on children, this one focuses on a mother. While cooking rice with her daughter, she remembers her own father, who seemed indifferent to her because farm work always kept him busy.
Suddenly, she becomes a rice seed and experiences growing into a plant through her father’s labor. The production vividly evokes the process of taking root and enduring drought and torrential rain, while her daughter watches her transformation.
After all, why should learning and growth be necessary only for children? Inside every adult is a child whose growth stopped somewhere along the way. That is true not only of the mother onstage but also of many adults who brought children to the theater.
Only after becoming parents themselves do they understand that the father whose distant back once hurt them was silently devoting himself to protecting the family. Watching farming unfold onstage, children learn both the farmer’s heart and a parent’s belated growth. One day, they too will leave the nursery bed of their parents and enter the world.
Come to think of it, the theater’s names are deeply connected with farming. Hakchon, meaning a “field of learning,” reflected Kim’s philosophy: a nursery bed where people could learn and grow. True to its name, it trained countless newcomers before sending them into the world.
The metaphor fits both the production and the history of the space. On that same ground, I laughed and cried watching rice seedlings and human hearts grow together. Kim, who practiced theater with the heart of a farmer, seemed somehow present there too.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
