kory has four collections: Seoul, Busan, Jeju — and Korea. The first three are places you can find on a map. The last one is not.
That was the hardest problem at the start. Seoul has the navy of dawn, Busan has the sea, Jeju has volcanic black — so what color do you make the whole country?
We decided to treat it as a mood, not a city
Try to draw Korea as a single place and you end up with a tourist product — Gyeongbokgung, hanbok, the Taegeuk. There is plenty of that already, and most of it goes into a drawer.
So we changed direction. Instead of depicting a scene, we would translate into color the air that stays with you when you think of this country.
The color came from a sunset
The Korean sky stays red for an unusually long time at dusk, because there are so many mountains and the sun goes down slowly behind the ridgelines. Until it is fully dark, red and navy sit together for a while.
The colors of the Korea edition come from that hour — a deep red-brown, the warm apricot left above it, and the navy of the opposite sky.
The white of a moon jar isn't white
In photographs a moon jar looks like white porcelain. In person it is hard to call it white. Depending on the light it turns faintly blue, or leans warm.
That milky white is the ground of the Korea edition. Pure white looks cold and empty; a white with a trace of color in it has a temperature when you hold it.
Something that refuses to resolve into one color — that felt closest to the impression this country leaves.
For anyone who couldn't pick a city
Some trips don't end in one city, and some people can't choose a single place. The Korea edition was made for exactly that.
It is not the memory of one place but something closer to the temperature of all the time you spent here.