928 S Western Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90006
Saturday, November 1, 2025
5:30PM
2025 Mohn LAND Grant recipient Woohee Cho will stage his performance How to Drive Home at Koreatown Plaza this November. The performance traces the housing histories of Cho’s two former roommates, Jisoo and Jin—fellow Korean immigrant artists currently based in Los Angeles. Like Cho, their housing experiences are deeply entangled with their diasporic journeys and the precarity that comes with navigating the process of finding a sense of belonging in Los Angeles.
To produce the score for the musical performance, the artist drove with each of the roommates to their former residences, interviewing them along the way about what life was like during the first years of their immigration to Los Angeles, and relating how housing and visa constraints shaped their day-to-day lives. These conversations were recorded, and Cho worked with two musicians to transform this recorded material into a loosely structured musical score. This score will serve as the basis for a live performance at Koreatown Plaza with Liang and gamin, who will each play instruments including the 생황 (Saenghwang) and 피리 (Piri) and perform choreographed movements. Additionally, Cho will be live translating the recording while using domestic items left by former roommates in his residences to make sounds relating to the narratives.
The live performance will take place in the central area of Koreatown Plaza on November 1, at 5:30PM. Koreatown Plaza (formerly Olympic Plaza) has been a hub in Los Angeles—its shops, restaurants, grocery store, and famed food court have served the Korean and Korean American community since 1988. The central atrium of this vibrant marketplace will host Cho’s performance, which will use its three-story LED screen to project images of Jisoo and Jin’s trajectory as told through their housing arrangements in Los Angeles.
A conversation with the artists and musicians, moderated by playwright Sarah Cho, will follow the performance. This portion of the event is presented in collaboration with GYOPO.
Woohee Cho is a visual artist based in Los Angeles and Seoul. His work focuses on moments in everyday life where individual identity collides with or is subsumed by society, queering these experiences through installation, video, and performance. He has held solo exhibitions at Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul (2023). His works have been shown at Vox Populi, Philadelphia (2025); Human Resources, LA (2024); Brussels Independent Film Festival (2022); Ann Arbor Film Festival (2021); Cork International Film Festival, Ireland (2021); OUTFEST Film Festival, Los Angeles (2021); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2020); and Roy Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) (2019), among others. He has been awarded artist residencies at the Alex Brown Foundation, Des Moines (2024); NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2023); The REEF, Los Angeles (2020–2021); and Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, NYC (2019). He has also received grants, including the Visual Arts Fellowship from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (2023); and the Body and Tech Fellowship from The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts, Valencia (2019).
Sarah Cho is a playwright, comedy writer and educator. She writes without the help of A.I. Her work has been developed/ presented by Ashland New Plays Festival, Great Plains Theatre Commons, IAMA Theatre Company, Jungle Theater, Moving Arts, and The Vagrancy. She’s received the Iowa Arts Fellowship, the Richard Maibaum Award, and the Kennedy Center’s Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award. Most recently, she was nominated for the Venturous Fellowship by the Playwrights Center. Her play stains was a finalist for the 2023 Jane Chambers Award and received a workshop production at Great Plains Theatre Commons earlier this year. She’s currently writing a brand new play with Artists at Play’s Writers Group as part of the Neighborhood Project. Sarah also co-hosts the very interesting playwriting podcast Beckett’s Babies with poet/playwright Sam Collier. In comedy, she’s performed at the Green Gravel and Laugh Riot Grrrl festivals, and written sketch comedy for house teams at the Pack Theater. You might catch her doing stand-up—only if the open mic wraps before bedtime. Sarah holds a BA in film and theater from UC Santa Barbara and an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. And yes, despite how this bio might read, Sarah wrote it all by herself without ChatGPT.