Design Korea
The Design Korea Research Hub will be led by Professor Jin Young Song (Architecture) at UB. Invited scholars and artists (including graduate students) will gather for a series of in-person and online workshops to explore Korea’s cultural production at the intersection of art, architecture, and the city, positioning Korea within contemporary global discourse.
Korea’s identity has often been framed through a Western gaze and idealized images—Hanok, palaces, temples—yet its cities remain dynamic, continually re-edited by global populations.
Today, Korea stands as a global cultural phenomenon: the worldwide success of K-pop, cinema, and literature, along with the growing visibility of Korean art and design, demonstrates that Korean identity is neither bound by tradition nor dependent on Western validation. Korea’s urban and cultural landscapes offer narratives that reach beyond surface appearances or commercial exchange. In streets, building facades, and everyday practices—marked by constant development and regenerations—one can read stories of work, desire, and belonging.
These everyday layers complicate conventional studies on Korea and open new ways of thinking about identity, modernity, and transformation. the Design Korea research hub seeks to document and reinterpret these narratives, providing a platform for scholars, artists, and designers to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue and to explore new perspectives on Korea within contemporary global discourse.
Rediscovering Koreanness investigates how Korea’s evolving cultural identity manifests through design—across architecture, urban space, art, and everyday life. Historically, the idea of Koreanness in architecture has been shaped by external pressures from Japan and the West—for instance, in Kim Soo-Geun’s Buyeo Museum (1967), which evoked public concern for its Japanese motif, or in Seoul’s embrace of deconstructivism in the 1990s, a Western response to Eurocentric modernism. Yet beneath these surface-level debates lies a deeper, more complex narrative: a society negotiating between memory and acceleration, intimacy and globality, ritual and innovation. It is time to rediscover identity and the true source of Korea’s soft power from within. This theme invites rediscovery not as a nostalgic return to the past, but as a critical and creative re-reading of how Koreanness is lived, built, and imagined today.
