Beauty and Sadness

Original Author:Kawabata Yasunari
Director: Carolyn Choa
Set and Costume Designer: Tim Yip


"Beauty and Sadness" tells the story of three beautiful women - Otoko, Keiko and Fumiko – and their intricate emotional entanglement that revolves around novelist Oki. The story opens with a sorrowful mood, develops in sorrow, and ends with sorrow.

The beautiful girl Otoko enters into an affair with a married man, Oki, but she is then abandoned. To escape from the place that evokes sadness, she leaves for Kyoto and survives tenaciously in the sinister society and finally becomes a famous painter. Otoko arouses people's aesthetic sentiment as she is the perfect female image universally received and hoped for in Japanese society. She is beautiful, mournful, tender yet tenacious. She is a figure of innocent sorrow and poignant beauty.

Keiko, who seeks to avenge Otoko, and Fumiko, wife of Oki, are equally beautiful in their own right. Immersed and entangled in the agonies brought by Oki, they are the victims of the tragic love of Oki and Otoko.

Tim Yip served as the set and costume designer. For this purpose, he and the team went all the way to the author Yasunari Kawabata’s former residence in Kamakura to shoot and collect source materials so as to enter the physical reality experienced by the author and characters and acquire the immediate sentiments felt by the author when writing the novel. Finally presented in the form of film and photography, the images will interact with the story happening on the stage. Such bold mixing of live action and a virtual world is a highlight of Tim’s work this time, and it will provide the audience with additional and unique visual input from the stage space.