'AI is the best tool — learn it faster than anyone, but don't become one'

Interview with AI artist Yoon Seok-kwan, known as Keepkwan

'Technology has gotten lighter, but the responsibility has grown heavier'

'As barriers fall, perspective becomes the differentiator'

AI artist Yoon Seok-kwan, who works under the name Keepkwan. [© Keepkwan]

"Learn the tools faster than anyone else — but don't become one. AI is the best tool out there, so study it deeply and embrace it fully. However, if you just copy other people's prompts and transcribe whatever AI spits out, you are no longer a creator — you are an extension of the tool."

Generative AI has ushered in an era where anyone can produce convincing content with a simple command. As the barriers to entry keep falling, where does the human creator's competitive edge lie? Yoon Seok-kwan, who works under the name Keepkwan, finds the answer not in the technology itself but in perspective and the questions one chooses to ask.

Yoon is an AI artist and creator who collaborates with AI to reinterpret Korean cultural heritage for contemporary audiences — through editorial photography, video, advertising and exhibitions. "The lower the technical barrier to making images becomes, the more important discernment, planning, editorial judgment and the ability to ask the right questions become — more so than the raw ability to produce," he said in a written interview.

Yoon began working seriously in AI art in 2022. The creative environment has changed enormously since then. "The biggest shift is that the process has moved from 'accidentally stumbling onto a good result' to 'designing and controlling an intended scene,'" he said. "Executing the technology has gotten lighter, but the creator's responsibility — deciding what to make and how to finish it — has actually grown heavier."

The defining material of his work is Korean traditional culture, with hanbok at its center. During a business trip abroad, Yoon once came across hanbok on display in a shop — labeled "Chinese kimono." The encounter prompted him to use the AI tools he was then learning to create content that could introduce Korean traditions to the world.

"I try to stay faithful to the historical accuracy that forms the core of tradition, while boldly expanding the genres and contemporary contexts in which it is shown," he said. "Rather than stopping at a faithful restoration of the past, what matters is making tradition come alive again through today's sensibility," he added.

The creative process behind an AI art image combining traditional Korean motifs with the fashion brand The North Face. [© Keepkwan]

Yoon also collaborates with companies. In a recent project with Paris Baguette, he connected the meaning of Joseon-era wedding ceremonies with the everyday life of modern families, using the brand's "blue rose cake" — released for Family Month — as his subject. "I am careful not to let tradition be consumed as mere decorative prop," he said. "I try to understand the message a brand wants to convey, and then find the point where that message meets the emotion tradition already carries within it."

He will take part in the Herald Design Lounge 2026, opening Oct. 2, leading a session titled "The most familiar thing, made into the most new." On this year's theme, "Beyond Visuals," he defined it as the process by which an image moves past what the eye sees to become experience, matter and memory — something that reaches the heart.

An AI hanbok editorial Yoon presented as images in Milan in 2024 was realized the following year as actual garments worn while walking through Gwanghwamun Square. This year he is expanding into the visualization of scent. Rather than remaining within the single sense of sight, he has set "omni-sense content" — work that can spread across all five senses — as his goal going forward.

He sees the designer's role as having expanded from "someone who directly makes everything" to "someone who decides what to make and designs its meaning and direction." "Anyone can produce one stunning image, but answering the question 'why must it be this particular scene?' and threading multiple works together through a single perspective — that is not easy," he said. "As barriers to entry fall, the differentiator shifts from technology to perspective."

What he emphasizes to young designers is what he calls "human mode" — not simply a call to switch AI off. It means asking "why" before "what" and "how," and consciously training analog sensibilities through hands-on practices like pottery or bonsai.

"AI can learn and reproduce my accumulated tastes and ways of working, but it cannot take my place in deciding what questions I will ask on Saturday or what new tastes I will develop. What must be protected is not 'the me of yesterday' but the power to keep changing and building 'the next me.' As long as that power is not lost, no matter how fast AI becomes, a creator will not be swallowed by the technology."

A work by Yoon Seok-kwan used in the promotional video for the 2026 Autumn Royal Court Culture Festival. [© Keepkwan]

korean@heraldcorp.com