What Remains — Theater and Art Worth Your Time This May
April's resurrection recedes, and May arrives. For the Christian, May is the month of family and of the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost — a season when the invisible presses closer than the visible. Something in that rhythm seems to have shaped this month's offerings. The productions and exhibitions gathering in May share a quiet preoccupation: with inscription, with what endures, with the things we leave behind.
Four works — one Christian stage production, one general musical, two general exhibitions. Different in form and genre, but read together, they point in the same direction. That a single word scratched into prison stone could sustain a woman for thirty-eight years. That a single question posed by a nineteenth-century novelist continues to demand an answer. That someone is still painting slowly, deliberately, in a world that forgets quickly.
1. One Word Carved into Stone — Musical: Resistance: People Who Became Hymns
Gwangya Art Ministry marks its twentieth anniversary with this production — the second installment of its Reformation series. That context alone tells you something about the weight of what's on stage. Over two decades, Gwangya has built the most serious body of Christian theatrical work in Korea, from Revelation to The Book: People Who Became the Bible. This new production both gathers that history and gestures toward the next chapter.
The story is set in 1730, in the south of France. Marie Durand is nineteen years old when she is thrown into the Tour de Constance — for no crime beyond being Huguenot, for no offense beyond refusing to convert to Rome. The pressure is steady and relentless: renounce your faith and walk free. But Marie takes a stone from the prison floor and scratches a single word into it. Résister. That word held her for thirty-eight years.
This is not a story of triumph. It is a story of an ordinary woman who wavered and grieved and persevered — and whose life became, by the end, a kind of hymn: Let God be praised, in every circumstance. The production carries the scholarly weight of pastoral consultation from Rev. Cho Byung-soo, director of the French Huguenot Research Institute, and is directed by a non-Christian filmmaker who approaches Marie as a human being rather than a monument. The result is a portrait of faith under pressure that does not flinch from the human cost.
To sit in this theater in May — with Pentecost on the near horizon — is to sit for a moment in the place where those who became hymns once sat. Where in our own time are we called to say no? What is it that makes a life, in the end, a song of praise?
< Performance Information >
- Venue: Gwangya Art Center, Cheongdam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul (Exit 4, Apgujeong Rodeo Station)
- Run: April 10 – October 31, 2026
- Schedule: Mon / Tue / Fri 7:30 PM · Wed 2:00 PM · Sat & holidays 2:00 PM & 6:00 PM (Thu & Sun dark; also dark 5/1 & 5/4)
- Tickets: General ₩50,000 · Balcony ₩35,000
- Running time: Approx. 115 minutes (no intermission) · Ages 8 and up
- Reservations: Gwangya Art Center website · Inquiries: 02-741-9182
2. The Question Five Men Cannot Escape — Musical: Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's final novel is where everything he believed came to a point. Translating more than fifteen hundred pages into a single evening on stage is an act of considerable nerve. This Korean original musical takes that risk, compressing the vast architecture of The Brothers Karamazov into a single event — the murder of a father — and the four men who stand in its shadow.
Fyodor, the father: a man of appetite and appetite alone, now dead. Dmitri, the eldest son, driven by passion and rage. Ivan, the second son, armed with an atheism he has reasoned to its sharpest edge. Alyosha, the youngest, whose faith attempts to hold what his brothers are pulling apart. And Smerdyakov, the household's illegitimate son, who has learned from Ivan that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. Ivan's one sentence hangs over the whole production: If there is no God, is everything then allowed?
For the Christian viewer, Dostoevsky's placement of Alyosha and the Elder Zosima is not incidental. These figures stand as witnesses inside the argument — not exempted from its pressure, but neither destroyed by it. The novel refuses to let the question be merely rhetorical, and so does this production. What begins as a family's catastrophe becomes a portrait of every human being who has stood before the silence and demanded a reason.
The work is accessible to those who haven't read the novel; the drama is dense but the story moves clearly. Those who have read it will find the weight distributed differently — and will want to sit with that for a while afterward.
< Performance Information >
- Venue: NOL Theatre Daehangno Woori Investment Securities Hall
- Run: May 12 – September 6, 2026
- Tickets: VIP ₩88,000 · R ₩77,000 · S ₩66,000 · A ₩55,000
- Reservations: NOL Ticket
3. Painting What Is About to Disappear — seongryul: We Who Resemble Summer
Something quiet opens in Hannam this spring. We Who Resemble Summer, the first major solo exhibition from illustrator and painter seongryul, arrives at Ground Seesaw Hannam. A graduate of the Korean National University of Arts, seongryul received the Grand Prize at Japan's 16th International Manga Award for the graphic novel Inside Summer (Munhakdongne, 2020) — the first Korean artist to take that prize. Many will have encountered his hand already, without knowing it: the album covers for Baek Yerin, for Lee Hi.
What seongryul paints are the spaces that are about to be lost. Watercolor bleeds across the surface — a noontime alley, the angle where light crosses shadow, a foreign landscape that feels remembered rather than visited. The brush is precise; the paint is unpredictable; the image that results is somewhere between familiar and strange. In an era when machines generate images at will, seongryul is still working slowly, still trying to hold time still on a single sheet of paper. His paintings occupy the space between adapting to a world that changes quickly and insisting that what was worth remembering still is.
The exhibition gathers more than one hundred works — original pages from Inside Summer, large-scale watercolors, new experiments in acrylic. The sensation is of summer's particular paradox: the heat on your face and the cool shade just behind you. Standing before these paintings, you begin to realize that the landscape you thought you had forgotten was yours all along.
< Exhibition Information >
- Venue: Ground Seesaw Hannam, Yongsan-gu, Seoul
- Run: April 30 – August 31, 2026 Admission: ₩20,000
- Reservations: NOL Ticket (Interpark), Naver Booking
4. What Holds Us Together — keykney Special Exhibition: Drew, and in That Time
1.21 million. That is the number of people following one illustrator on Instagram. keykney — self-styled "illustratormanator" — spent nine years grinding through freelance work before burning out. He stepped back, opened an account, and began drawing single-panel comics in response to reader comments. The offer was simple: I'll draw anything you send me. That promise has now gathered more than a million people into something that looks, from the outside, like a daily conversation about what it means to be alive.
His first large-scale solo exhibition, Drew, and in That Time, opened at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza on April 25. The space — four hundred pyeong across twelve sections — has been built to feel less like a gallery and more like stepping inside one of his panels. Illustrations and films and sculptures, some larger than a person, fill every corner. A giant keykney sits with his chin in his hand, thinking through someone's story. That is where the visitor's journey begins.
The world inside this exhibition is built from exchanges between strangers: the comment left at 2 AM, the story someone sent because they had nowhere else to send it, the reply-drawing that arrived the next morning and made someone laugh or cry in a way they hadn't expected. One drawing becomes a comfort. That comfort becomes another comment. The cycle runs eight years deep by now, and the whole of it has been brought into one room.
May, the month given to family, lends these works a particular resonance. What is the weight of the word between? What holds the distance between people — what crosses it? keykney's comics have always been, underneath the humor, an answer to those questions. Both the drawings that make you laugh out loud and the ones that stay with you for days are gathered here now, in one place.
< Exhibition Information >
- Venue: DDP (Dongdaemun Design Plaza) Museum Exhibition Hall 1, Euljiro, Jung-gu, Seoul
- Run: April 25 – September 6, 2026
- Hours: Daily 10:00 AM – 8:00 PM (no closures)
- Admission: Adult ₩22,000 · Youth ₩15,000 · Child ₩13,000
- Reservations: NOL Ticket (Interpark), Naver Booking
A Final Word
The Christian lives May as two landscapes at once: the month of family and parents, and the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost that end in the coming of the Spirit. The works gathered here do not all know that they belong to this season. But they do. Before the woman who scratched one word into stone. Before the brothers whose father's death forces a reckoning with what God is or is not. Before the painter holding on to what is about to disappear. Before the million small exchanges gathered into a single room. In each of these places, something has already been inscribed. The mark was there before we arrived.
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