Showcasing a comprehensive collection of contemporary product and graphic design from South Korea, this book explores the country’s current design culture between tradition and the future.

In Korea Power, the featured work of artists and designers offers an impressively nuanced documentation of “Korean identity” that is supplemented by insightful texts and interviews. A selection of images by the legendary Korean advertising photographer Kim Han-Yong shot in the years of reconstruction following the Korean War shows the foundation from which today’s designs are created.

South Korea’s rapid rise to an economic superpower almost swept away all traces of a traditional lifestyle. Today, however, the cultural values of Korea’s past are again becoming more influential. As Korea Power shows, many Korean designers now have a new sensibility for their culture’s traditional definition of beauty that they are using to define an original, distinctly Korean elegance.