Korean Culture Month: Illustrator Wooh Nayoung in Conversation with Dr Yunah Lee

Festival

Join us as we welcome Wooh Nayoung, a renowned illustrator whom you may know under her pen name ‘Obsidian’. Combining her training in both traditional style of Asian painting and game design, her illustrations have become a viral sensation and a unique way of promoting the beauty of hanbok. She’ll engage in an in-person conversation with Dr Yunah Lee, exploring her creative inspiration and the interplay between tradition and modernity.

During this talk, you’ll discover the fascinating origins of her distinctive style of reinterpreting Western characters in ‘Hanbok’ (Korean traditional clothing) and the story of her collaborative projects with Netflix, Marvel, Disney, etc.

Wooh Nayoung is an illustrator who works especially on digital drawings of characters wearing Hanbok, Korea’s traditional clothing. Her internationally most famous works are Fairy Tale Series, which reinterpreted its characters as if they were based in Korea.

Drawings from her series Western Fairy Tales in Korea have been included in various exhibitions in Europe, the U.S., and Korea. She has also collaborated with several global companies on their marketing campaigns, including Disney, Marvel, Johnnie Walker, and Blizzard Entertainment. In 2019, following the publication in Korea of her book The Story of Hanbok, she received an award from the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism for her efforts to popularise and familiarise people with the hanbok.

Dr Yunah Lee is a Principal Lecturer based at the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton. Her research focuses on design history, visual and material culture in Korea and East Asia, transnational and cross-cultural studies of modernity and modernism, representations of na-tional and personal identities, and political agencies of art and design. Her research on Korean fashion and dress was published in the International Journal of Fashion Studies and Dress History of Korea: Critical Perspectives on Primary Sources. She co-edited Design and Modernity in Asia: National Identity and Transnational Exchanges 1945-1990.