Ahran Won is a Seoul-based artist whose work moves between drawing, video, and speculative architecture. Beginning with hand drawing and passing through layered digital processes — Photoshop, Nanobanana, and Kling 3.0 — her images unfold into moving worlds: imagined cities,...
Read MoreAhran Won is a Seoul-based artist whose work moves between drawing, video, and speculative architecture. Beginning with hand drawing and passing through layered digital processes — Photoshop, Nanobanana, and Kling 3.0 — her images unfold into moving worlds: imagined cities, ecological terrains, ritual structures, and unstable futures suspended somewhere between architectural thesis and dream.
Originally trained as an architect at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Won approaches architecture less as construction than as a speculative condition — a way of imagining political, emotional, and ecological realities before they exist. Her Harvard thesis, Seosengwon: Vanguards for Korea’s Soft Reunification, envisioned the DMZ as a site of speculative ecology and soft-border futures.
In 2017, she was selected as a Prototype Winner of the Lexus Design Award from more than 1,100 entries across 63 countries. Mentored by Neri & Hu, her project Having Nothing, and Yet Possessing Everything was exhibited at La Triennale di Milano as part of the Lexus YET Pavilion alongside works by Neri Oxman and the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter Group.
Her work has appeared in Designboom, Cool Hunting, Design Milk, Design Week, and Indesign Live. She is currently developing Irregular City, an ongoing video series that transforms hand-drawn architectural studies into drifting time-based environments.
She lives and works in Seoul.
