Wedding Dress 44 / Hyojin / As You Know, Eunyeol / Meet Me on the Rooftop / Boni / Forever Size 77 / Happy Cookie Year / Divorce Sale / Forehead and Sand / Commentary | Heohee / Author's Note / Announcement of the Works

Concern for you, who sits in the place I left you,
A story of strong solidarity created by such a heart

The title piece, "Meet Me on the Rooftop," tells the story of a woman who suffers from absurd labor practices and sexual harassment at work and always feels the urge to jump off the rooftop. She finally escapes from despair after inheriting a secret recipe from her coworkers.
On the surface of the story, there is a book of magic tricks, but the power that kept me going was actually the people who “lovingly tilted their heads inward and thought together about how to untangle each day, which was like a tangled thread,” and the older sisters who stopped me from jumping from the rooftop.
So, ‘I’ am concerned about “you who came as my successor” and hope that “you” will discover “my story and that of my sisters.”
The concern for someone who has taken the seat I left behind creates a strong force of solidarity just by that heart.


"Wedding Dress 44," a work containing the voices of 44 women connected by the same dress, tells the stories of women who have gotten married or are about to get married while wearing a borrowed dress in the form of 44 short episodes.
This work vividly portrays marriage as an institution, not a romantic myth, and features various female narratives. It is particularly significant that the last women to wear this dress were high school students.
What kind of scenery will they be like when they become adults and get married, or when they don't?
Jeong Se-rang has an exceptional talent for portraying the stories of diverse female characters.
There is no other artist who displays this contemporaneity with such a unique sensibility as Jeong Se-rang.


“Divorce Sale” tells the story of Jae Lee and his friends who hold a “divorce sale” to get rid of all the belongings in their house after getting divorced. “I don’t see people in their 40s… I don’t see people in their 50s.
There are voices expressing the difficulties of working life as a woman, asking, “Where have all the seniors gone?” and there are also voices reflecting on their own choices while raising children, feeling like “other people’s lives are wonderful and I’m the only one left in hell.”


Hyojin, the protagonist of “Hyojin,” is a character who escaped from “something dark and sticky.”
He runs away from his father, who forces him to live up to his name, Hyo-do Hyo, and from his ex-lover, who is full of inferiority complex and thinks he left him because he was poor.
Hyojin's voice, which tells us to run away rather than confront the predicted misfortune, gives us a strange courage as we live here and now.


Could it be that my special talent is the ability to run away? Everyone is naturally good at different things.
In my case, that's the ability to escape.
He really is a good runaway.
A person who runs away before things get too bad, before they get hurt, before they become tattered. (Page 62)

There's definitely something to be gained from escaping to a cool place and taking a breather. (Page 64)

"Boni", who creates a "Sudden Death Map" with her friends as a way to mourn her sister's sudden death from overwork, and "Hacky Cookie Ears", the story of Ismail, who came to Korea to study abroad and ended up with cookie ears while working part-time at a cookie factory, are reminiscent of the previous work, "Fifty People".
The author has been constantly thinking about how people who died simply for doing their jobs, and people who were fired for reporting the absurdity of the organizations they belonged to, can overcome their misfortune and move on to the next generation.


Meanwhile, "Forever Size 77", which tells the story of a woman who becomes a vampire who dies if she eats dried persimmons; "As You Know, Eunyeol", which imagines a female character named "Eunyeol" and places it in the pre-modern history of Korea-Japan relations; and "Forehead and Sand", which depicts the misunderstandings between two countries that speak different languages ​​due to letters sent by arrows, are works that clearly show how freely the author unleashes his diverse imagination.

In "Meet Me on the Rooftop," there is a 'husband' who sucks up despair.
Because he is a being who must eat despair like rice, 'I' bring people who are in despair in front of him.
The aspects are also diverse.
“A chef who lost her sense of smell after brain tumor surgery,” “A cat mom who had friction with a mean neighbor,” “A telemarketer,” “A person whose parrot she raised for over 20 years died,” “The daughter of a far-right congressman,” etc. The author makes us imagine the lives of people based on their occupations and situations alone.


In an interview, Jeong Se-rang said, “I wanted to call out the names of good people.” She continues to call out the names of each of us, who may seem like ordinary people, but in fact have many faces.
A new story with Jeong Se-rang's own angle and color is born at this very point.
As we follow the author's gaze as he portrays many incomprehensible things in the world, we find ourselves wanting to believe in the loving hands that hold living things.
That affection is the 'cheerfulness' that only Jeong Se-rang can show.
We need writers like this now.
I hope that his affection and strength will be contagious to everyone.