Born in 1963, he graduated from the Department of French Language and Literature at Korea University. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees in linguistics and semiotics from the University of Paris X in France. He was selected for the LG Yonam Foundation’s overseas research program and served as a visiting professor at the Department of Art History and the Institute of Linguistics at Oxford University in the UK, a visiting professor at Harvard University in the US as a Fulbright Fellow, a visiting professor at the University of Limoges in France, an honorary professor at the University of Dijon in France, a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and a distinguished professor at the University of Havre in France. He was also selected as an Asian Studies Fellow by the POSCO TJ Park Cultural Foundation. He served as the editor-in-chief of the Korean Society of Semiotics and the International Society of Linguistics for the Humanities. He is currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Korea University and a professor in charge of the collaborative program in Visual Culture Studies. He is also an executive member of the International Society of Semiotics, an editorial member of Semiotica, the world’s most authoritative journal in the field of semiotics, president of the Korean Society of Semiotics, and vice president of the Korean Society of Visual Culture Studies. He has won the Best Paper Award from Semiotica and has published numerous papers in international semiotics, media studies, and linguistics journals such as Degres, Language, and Kodikas. He has translated works by Derrida, Greimas, Peirce, Eco, and Floch, and was awarded the Hankook Ilbo Publishing Culture Award (translation category) in 1996. His publications include Lectures on Modern Semiotics, From Logos to Mythos, From Structure to Sensibility, The Transformation of Digital Language and Humanities, Signs, Rhythm, and Space, and Homo Mobilicus.