Leonard Koren was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles. While a teenager he designed and built a full-scale Japanese tea house out of scavenged materials. While an undergraduate student at UCLA, Koren was awarded a fellowship to pursue experiments in photographic process. He also worked as an exhibition installer at the university’s fine arts and ethnographic museums. In 1969 Koren quit school and co-founded the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a trompe l’oeil mural painting group that executed large-scale outdoor commissions in Los Angeles and Paris. One of the murals, “Beverly Hills Siddhartha,” covered 5,000 square meters and took a year to complete. Tired of painting, Koren returned to UCLA and received a master’s degree in architecture and urban planning. From 1973 through 1976 Koren worked as an artist creating bath events, unusual bathing environments, and paper works about bathing. In 1976 Koren founded WET: THE MAGAZINE OF GOURMET BATHING, an avant-garde publication seminal in the development of postmodern aesthetics. Burned out on magazine publishing, Koren shut WET down in late 1981 and began a series of sojourns to Tokyo to work on music videos for Japanese television. From 1983 through 1986 Koren produced a twice-monthly column titled “Dr. Leonardo’s Guide to Cultural Anthropology” for BRUTUS, a popular Japanese lifestyle magazine. In 1984 Koren wrote and designed New Fashion Japan, a book about the world of Japanese fashion past and present. Stimulated by the book-making process, he continued to make more books. Many of these books are featured on this website.
Authors
Leonard Koren
다른 사람들
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A graphic designer and illustrator based in Seoul. She majored in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and earned both her master’s and doctoral degrees in Visual Design from the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Seoul National University. Currently, she is a professor at the University of Seoul. In 2008, she was recognized as a Next-Generation Design Leader by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy and was also selected as a Star Product Designer by the Korea Craft & Design Foundation.
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Chae Sung-zin
After graduating from the Department of Applied Arts at Seoul National University in 1985, he earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Industrial Design from Hongik University in 1987 and from the University of Michigan in 1990. In 2007, she completed her Ph.D. in Design Studies at Seoul National University with his dissertation, The Characteristics of Technology and the Formation of Product Archetypes (advisor: Lee Soon-jong). He served as an associate professor in the Department of Design … -
Jeong Jin-uk
Majored in Aesthetics at university and admires musicians who compose and transcribe invisible music. Believes that love resembles music in its essence. During times of turbulence, instead of leaning on a prewritten life, he embraces her uncertainties and writes imperfect sentences as if transcribing music, striving to play his future more vividly. He is the publisher of ESSAI , an independent magazine for minimalists, and the author of Etudes on Love . -
Park Hey-kyung
She studied Western painting at Seoul National University College of Fine Arts and its graduate school. She received a master’s degree in interior design from Drexel University in the United States and a doctorate in architectural planning from Kyungpook National University’s Graduate School of Engineering. She is currently a professor at Inje University’s Department of Design. -
Hwang Hee-gyeong
She majored in Textile Arts at Hongik University and earned a master’s degree in Design Strategy and Innovation from Brunel University in the UK. She worked as a fashion information planner and trend analysis researcher at a major apparel corporation and a consulting firm. Currently, she is a translator with Barun Translators. Her translated works include Service Design for Customer Experience Innovation and Shoes: A Cultural History of Style . -
Sakurada Jun
He graduated from the Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics, Gakushuin University, Japan. After working as a programmer, system engineer, and web designer, he has been running the website “Visual Thinking” since 2010, introducing infographics and creating pictograms, diagrams, and infographics. -
Han Myoung-sik
Graduated with a degree in Interior Design from the École Municipale des Beaux-Arts Appliqués in Lyon, France, and worked as an interior designer at LG Chem. Currently, teaches and explores architectural spaces with students in the Department of Interior Architecture at Daegu Haany University. -
Kil Hyung-jin
He is passionate about design and making complex concepts more accessible. He is currently working on design systems at Wanted Lab to improve the speed and quality of digital product creation. -
Kim Hee-jung
She studied visual design at Hongik University. She went on to study photography at Parsons School of Design and completed her MFA in fine art at Chelsea College of Art & Design. Since returning to Korea, she has been working and teaching at the university level. She has held four solo exhibitions, including Family in 2004, Kumho Young Artist: Pink & White in 2007, and Broken But in 2012, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at the Seoul Museum of Art and the Gyeonggi … -
Lee Seung-heon
Lee Seung-heon is a professor of interior architecture at Dongmyung University. He majored in architectural engineering at Dong-A University and earned his PhD from Pusan National University with a thesis on the meaning and expression of locality in architecture. He writes and lectures on various media for public understanding of architecture, and his research interests include the evolution of space and the aesthetics of weaving. He has worked as a planner and designer for ‘Reno House , … -
Adolf Loos
Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was an Austrian and Czechoslovak architect, influential European theorist, and a polemicist of modern architecture. He was inspired by modernism and a widely-known critic of the Art Nouveau movement. His controversial views and literary contributions sparked the establishment of the Vienna Secession movement and postmodernism. -
Lee sang-hoon
He graduated with honors from Hongik University, College of Fine Arts. He received his master’s degree in contextual design from Design Academy Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and his doctorate in educational psychology from Korea University. He was selected as a Korean Next Generation Design Leader by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and is currently a professor at the Department of Design Convergence, College of Architecture, Hongik University.