A play by Hyunseo Lim (10.2026)
After a divorce from her white American spouse, a Korean lesbian playwright spends 27 days in New York. Moving through bars, dating apps, and borrowed apartments, she finds herself drawn to the same things that hurt her: whiteness, citizenship, and the power of a white American partner. Darkly funny and self-aware, the play asks who sold the American Dream, and who chose to buy it.
White Lies
Poster and animation by SJ Yun
Design Notes
Distorted type. “White Lies” means two things: the lies told to H (marriage, freedom, progress) and the lies she tells herself to keep believing them. The smeared, wavering letters show where blame and self-deception blur together.
Overlay and swirl. H keeps imagining one body layered over another, and the play ends with bodies of many races piled on top of her. The swirl’s layering and afterimages echo this. Its concentric repetition also mirrors the play’s circular structure, which begins and ends at JFK, subtly changed.
Gray, not pure white. The play refuses a clean black-and-white binary, and H herself keeps wavering at the boundary. Gray gradients and texture carry that: a line that can’t be cleanly drawn.
Variations
V1. Blurred black letters that smear and stack, so you can’t tell where blame ends and self-deception begins.
V2. A pale, ghosted wordmark in gray, where the lie fades out but never fully clears.
V3. The title pulled into a spiral, circling back to where it started, like the play’s JFK-to-JFK loop.