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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Graduated from the Department of Design at Tokyo University of the Arts, she worked at Ajinomoto Co., Inc. and Deska Co. before embarking on a freelance career. She carved out a unique space in the design world with works that fuse simplified forms and trick art, embodying a playful and cynical spirit. Her accolades include the Gold Prize at the Warsaw International Poster Biennale, the Grand Prix at the Poland 30th Anniversary of Victory International Poster Competition, the Newcomer Award …
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Ezio Manzini
Ezio Manzini is a world-renowned scholar in the field of design for sustainability. In 2009, he founded the DESIS Network, a network of design universities dedicated to social innovation design, to connect design universities around the world and revitalize the discourse on social innovation design. As a longtime professor of design at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, he conducted research on design for sustainability and expanded the scope of design education by launching new design majors such … -
Nagaoka Kenmei
Design activist, publisher of d design travel . Born in 1965 in Mororan City, Hokkaido, and raised in Agui Town, Aichi Prefecture. He participated in the establishment of the Hara Design Institute, Japan Design Center, and founded Drawing & Manual in 1997 and D&DEPARTMENT PROJECT in 2000. He later founded 60VISION and proposed branding styles beyond reprinting, such as Garimoku 60. Long-life design is the theme of his activities, which range from publishing to product development. He … -
MERRY-MJ
Born in 1983 in South Korea. He earned a master’s degree in graphic design from Tama Art University Graduate School of Art and completed the TOMSBOX Picture Book Workshop training program in 2009. In 2010, she won the Jury Prize from art director Morimoto Chie at the Illustrated Notes (Seibundo Shinkosha) Notes exhibition, and in 2014, she was selected as Illustrator of the Year at La Fiera del Libroper Ragazzi di Bologna (Bologna International Children’s Book Fair) in Italy. She … -
Nat McCully
Nat McCully worked at Claris Corporation and Apple Computer in Japanese product development, specializing in text layout, from 1991 to 1998. He then joined Adobe Systems as the lead engineer for the Japanese version of InDesign, implementing text composition and Japanese publishing workflow features. He has worked on Flash, AIR, RMSDK, and advised the teams on Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe Text Engine (ATE). He now works with the Spark and the XD teams on worldwide extensibility and … -
Pyo Hyun-myung
President of KT. In 2004, during his tenure as Vice President of Marketing at KTF, he played a pivotal role in introducing service design into corporate management and marketing activities in Korea. Drawing on his extensive experience as a corporate leader, he applied service design to KT’s innovations, leading to the creation of iconic branding campaigns such as Have a good time (2005), SHOW (2007), QOOK (2009), and the groundbreaking exclamation olleh (2010). These efforts marked a … -
Lee Yu-jin
Lee Yu-jin graduated from Ewha Womans University with a B.A. in Sociology and received her M.A. in Art History from Hongik University. She has been engaged in art education for the general public, exhibition planning, and publishing activities at museums. She is the author of Critic Lee Il and the AG Group in the 1970s , Critic Lee Il Anthology and The Birth of a Hero among other books. -
Ito Toyo
Toyo Ito (born 1 June 1941) is a Japanese architect known for creating conceptual architecture, in which he seeks to simultaneously express the physical and virtual worlds. He is a leading exponent of architecture that addresses the contemporary notion of a “simulated” city, and has been called “one of the world’s most innovative and influential architects.” In 2013, Ito was awarded the Pritzker Prize, one of architecture’s most prestigious prizes. He was a … -
Lee Jung-kuk
Lee Jung-kuk graduated from Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Education, and attended the Emerson College Waldorf Teacher Training Program and the Visual Arts Program in the UK. -
Naka Toshiharu
Born in Kyoto Prefecture in 1976. Graduated from the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Tokyo in 1999, and completed a Master’s degree in Architecture at the Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo in 2001. After working at Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, he established Naka Architecture Studio in 2009. Served as a design assistant at Y-GSA, Yokohama National University Graduate School from 2009 to 2011. Received the Young Architect … -
Ulf Meyer
Born in 1970 in Berlin, Germany. Writer, critic, and educator specializing in architecture. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin(Germany) and the Illinois Institute of Technology(USA), worked at Inggenhofen Architects(Germany) and Shigeruban Architects(Japan), and was an architecture journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle (USA). He has published hundreds of articles on architecture and urban design in newspapers, magazines, and internet media in Europe and … -
Soonbho Park
He graduated from the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University and earned a master’s degree from its graduate school. He obtained a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Bergische Universität Wuppertal. He previously served as a professor at the College of Design at Hongik University and as the director of the Art and Engineering Research Center at the Korea-Germany Graduate School of Engineering. Currently, he is the senior vice president of the Korean Society of Basic Design & Art (KSBDA) and the …