The fish leaping from the monitor, the bubbles, the glowing globe, the field of vibrant green grass, the soft gradient of a blue sky. By now we have seen these stock images that float around the web and have become virtually synonymous with “Frutiger Aero.” They often bear filler text about the Korean web and stock image corporation Asadal (아사달), about which little is known. In this special interview, design researcher Yunseon Yang lets Asadal CEO Chang N. Suh share with us the story of these web-native images: how they became systematized in a “design factory,” how they propagated across all of East Asia and beyond, how they eventually disappeared as smartphones swept the scene and minimal design took hold, and how they may very well be on their way back. With the backdrop of South Korea’s ascent into an information society, we present a rare firsthand account of Asadal’s design mall—and thus a huge part of “Frutiger Aero”—straight from one of its sources. — Sofi Xian
Korean version available here.
Birth of a Stock Image Industry
Yunseon Yang: Before we start the interview, have you heard of the term “Frutiger Aero”? It was an aesthetic popular in the mid-to-late 2000s. As digital technology was developing at the time, it was characterized by the way natural elements were blended with digital to make digital experiences feel more familiar and approachable. Asadal’s stock images from that period are a good example of this aesthetic. Do you remember this most famous image among them?
Chang N. Suh: It is a very familiar image to me. The monitor in the image is actually the monitor we used at our company. And do you see the seagull at the top? I think that might be a photograph I took myself. I used to take a lot of photos of seagulls, and this seems to be one of them. The rest was all illustrated.
YY: Could you tell me the story of Asadal? While I was researching Asadal, I came across your interview titled “A Reflection on 14 Years Since Founding.”1 In that interview, you mentioned that among Asadal’s ten new business ventures, the design mall became the most successful. Why do you think it succeeded? What were the thoughts of both you and your employees at the time? Did you expect it to become successful?
CS: I founded Asadal as a sole proprietorship in 1998, when I was twenty-nine years old. After operating for about two years as a personal business, we established it as a corporation in early 2000. During the internet boom in South Korea in the early 2000s, there was the dot-com bubble, the rise of KOSDAQ, and our internet business was doing very well.
At first, we focused on two core services: domain registration and web hosting. People who registered domains and purchased hosting naturally wanted to build websites—corporate clients, small and medium-sized businesses, large corporations, government agencies, public institutions, and civic organizations. In the 2000s, there was a huge enthusiasm for creating websites. To build a website, people first needed a domain name, which they registered through our company. Since purchasing and maintaining their own web servers was expensive, we rented out server space through hosting services.
Over time, our clients started asking whether we could also design websites for them. We could, but custom design work required a great deal of labor, and one person could only produce a limited amount. Then, at some point, we noticed something interesting: one designer would create an icon, and the next designer would make something almost identical from scratch again and again. We realized that if we created something once but created it exceptionally well and allowed it to be reused, productivity could increase dramatically.
This was around 2003 or 2004, about four or five years after the company started. By then, the company had grown to around thirty employees and had become financially stable. At the time, internet shopping malls, games, films—everything seemed to be moving online, so we invested in ten new business ventures, hiring people and allocating resources to each. Nine of them failed. The only one that survived was the design mall.
In truth, it survived because the market wanted it. The response was explosive from the beginning. Initially, only four people worked on the project: a team leader, two staff members, and myself. But the number of downloads on the server quickly became overwhelming, and we realized that this business had serious potential. So we decided to expand the team and hire more designers.
The very first products we created were illustrated icons. Rather than complete web design templates, these were repetitive interface elements commonly used on web pages—announcement icons, microphones, speakers, bulletin boards, comments, reply buttons, and so on. We sold them actively, and because they were vector illustrations, anyone could download the original files, edit them, and resize them freely.
What made them especially attractive was the price. Compared to designing assets from scratch, they cost only a fraction—perhaps one-tenth or even one-hundredth of the original labor cost. Designers who might otherwise spend an entire day creating five icons could instead pay a small amount and instantly download a package of one hundred icons. This saved web designers an enormous amount of working time.
For us, it also became profitable because we were no longer creating a custom product for a single client. Instead of spending days producing something that could only be sold once, we could sell the same product hundreds or thousands of times. It became a win-win structure. We specialized in creating high-quality web elements for websites and sold usage rights at affordable prices, while web designers across Korea could purchase them cheaply and dramatically reduce the time needed to complete their own projects.
Creating for the Web
CS: As the business grew, similar services started appearing. But what differentiated us was our visual approach. Existing image-source companies came from print design backgrounds and worked with subtractive color mixing (CMYK) where colors become darker as more ink is added. But web design works differently. It uses additive color, RGB. Since many traditional companies did not fully understand this difference, they struggled to adapt. We, however, had been creating specifically for the web from the beginning. Because of RGB displays, our colors appeared bright, vivid, and visually striking. Since our work was often used in IT-related contexts, we naturally leaned into a futuristic, digital aesthetic.
Blue, in particular, became very important. In print, it was difficult to reproduce those bright, luminous blues, but on computer monitors, RGB made them appear vivid and beautiful. That is why many of our images—including the fish image—featured blue backgrounds. Traditional printing companies could not reproduce this visual quality, so they struggled to compete. Around the same time, several web-based design companies emerged that shared a similar visual language.
However, we expanded beyond icons. We created illustrated human figures, objects, and backgrounds. Eventually, we even began offering complete website layouts. Designers could download near-finished homepage templates: a main page with navigation structures already in place, plus subpages. They simply had to replace the placeholder text with their own content, and the website was essentially complete.
There was also Adobe Flash at the time, which is now discontinued. We created Flash source files as well and continuously broadened our offerings. We started with illustrated icons, but later added Painter-based graphics, which had a watercolor-like texture, as though paint had spread naturally across the surface.
The possibilities kept expanding. Korean web designers increasingly gathered on our site because we provided such a wide range of resources. We would separate illustrations, Painter graphics, photographs, and other elements into editable layers and sell them as what we called “editable images.” When users opened the files, everything—from water droplets to monitors, fish, and globes—was separated into layers, allowing them to freely recombine and reuse elements. The response was explosive.
There were many visual styles, but among them we increasingly began creating images that felt highly futuristic and digital: visual worlds where fantasy, imagination, and reality seemed to blend together.
Design Factory
YY: So there were other companies producing stock images as well?
CS: Of course there were. We quickly established influence in the market, and as many web designers in Korea naturally began using Asadal, competing services operating in a similar space gradually faced increasing difficulties. We appeared almost like a comet and quickly dominated the market. At some point, I began approaching competing companies directly and said, “Why are we competing and duplicating each other’s efforts? We are both losing money this way. Let’s merge.” Eventually, we acquired several companies through investments worth several hundred million won.23 As these services became consolidated, we became a dominant force in the market. Essentially, we had a monopoly. In Korea, we were overwhelmingly number one. There was probably no designer in Korea who had not purchased our images.
We bundled all of these images onto CDs. I think we produced around sixty CD packages. Each CD contained thousands, even tens of thousands, of images, and with over sixty sets, there were hundreds of thousands of assets in circulation. Designers would often purchase several of these source-image CDs and keep them on hand. At the time, owning a strong design archive was itself a competitive advantage for designers. When designers joined companies, one of the standard questions regarding working conditions was often: Will the company provide Asadal design source CDs? Designers would also pass the materials on to one another, using them extensively in their work. At one point, we had over one hundred designers in the company—more than one hundred web designers alone. Out of approximately 160 total employees, over one hundred were designers producing image resources.
The design division primarily worked on homepage layouts and website mockups, while the content division focused on producing individual visual assets. There were more women than men among the employees, many in their twenties and thirties, and the company atmosphere was very positive. We were earning a lot of money, after all.
Naturally, in the early stages, the quality of the designs varied greatly. To standardize quality, we appointed multiple team leaders. If something felt too unusual or inconsistent with the company’s visual identity, we simply would not sell it—we discarded it. Only assets that met a certain quality standard were approved for sale, which meant the overall quality remained consistently above average. Among those approved works, some of the best-performing design assets generated extraordinary profits. There were cases where a single source file earned more than ten million won.4 Because of this, we implemented a performance-based compensation system, rewarding individual designers with bonuses. Sometimes their incentives exceeded their base salary. As a result, designers worked extremely hard, researched emerging trends, and studied overseas cases. Internal competition became intense. We held design seminars and technical discussions, constantly pushing to create the strongest designs.
For us, the best design was not the most artistic one. The best design was the one most frequently chosen by our customers and users. As a result, download numbers and sales figures became the key benchmarks. If one designer created a successful visual style, everyone else followed it. For example, if someone developed an experimental shadow effect and the market responded positively, suddenly all one hundred designers would begin producing shadow-based designs. In no time, the stock image market became saturated with our visual language.
Because of this, people had both praise and criticism for us. Some would say, “They’re not really a design company. They’re a design factory.” Once a new style emerged, one hundred designers would reproduce it simultaneously.
YY: So there were guidelines?
CS: Countless guidelines. When designers first joined the company, they received training because their work needed to align with the company style. We gathered examples of successful designs and held daily design seminars, constantly discussing and refining internal guidelines. As these discussions shaped the design process, people began asking: How can one hundred designers create work that looks as though it came from a single person? That became a point of controversy. Asadal images were distinctive—you could immediately recognize them as ours. That became one of the defining characteristics of the company.
An East Asian Production Network
YY: Then would it be fair to say that most of the composited stock images were produced by Asadal?
CS: More than ninety percent, I would say, were made by us. There were very few competitors in Korea. Some existed, but we eventually absorbed most of them.
After succeeding in Korea, we decided to expand into Japan. In 2009, we established Asadal Co., Ltd. there and partnered with a local company called Pixta. We distributed our work through their platform, and Asadal images spread widely in Japan as well. Although sales are not as large as before, our images are still being sold through Pixta today.
Before that, we established and operated a company in Yanji, Jilin Province, China, an even larger market, in 2008. At first, sales were promising, but after reaching a certain level, we discovered that people were illegally copying our CDs and reselling them. Not just one or two cases—hundreds. They were reproducing our entire catalog and selling it for one-tenth of the original price, simply changing the packaging and company name. So our images became extremely widespread in China, but only a small portion of those sales came through us. A massive amount circulated through illegal distributors.
In Japan, we established only a small company for sales partnerships. In China, however, we hired dozens of designers locally and produced design assets at scale there as well. Later, during a period of improved relations between North and South Korea5, we even went to Pyongyang. Around thirty designers there were assigned to work on design production as well. In a sense, an East Asian global production network emerged. Main production took place in Korea, while China and Pyongyang also produced images for us. Everything was then gathered in Korea, where it underwent quality review. Assets were either approved or rejected, and approved materials were revised further if necessary. Once finalized, they were sold under the Asadal brand across Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China. Recently, it seems the products have even reached Europe. In addition, in Taiwan, active sales are currently being conducted through a partnership with a local partner.
At that point, the business had grown into a global operation. It became something like an era-defining trend. In the beginning, only one or two people created these designs. But later, when hundreds of people were producing them in the same visual language, it became impossible for others to compete.
End of Asadal-style
YY: Are the designers who worked around the world still active today?
CS: The number has decreased significantly. Design trends changed. At the time, I used to say, “A trend lasts about five years.” I thought that when one trend faded, we could simply create a new visual style and continue. But the problem was that design styles did not just change every five years—the technology itself changed.
Then came the iPhone and smartphones. Compared to today, devices back then were not very powerful, and internet speeds were often slow. Even when the phone itself performed reasonably well, network lag made loading websites painfully slow. Our images were extremely detailed and had very large file sizes.
As a result, design shifted away from detailed, realistic 3D visuals toward flat design, and eventually minimalism emerged. Minimalism? That essentially meant the end of Asadal-style design. Images disappeared from websites, interfaces became text-heavy, and responsive web design became the norm.
Suddenly, our visual language was seen as outdated. People would react by saying, “You still use images like this? That looks old-fashioned.” On top of that, mobile data usage became a concern because people worried about high monthly phone bills. This was not simply a matter of updating our visual style every five years—the underlying technology had changed so fundamentally that people stopped using large images altogether.
As a result, we had to reduce the size of the design operation. Designers no longer received performance bonuses, the work became less rewarding, and many moved to other jobs. The company gradually shrank, and now we are simply maintaining what remains.
In the end, our greatest advantage had been timing. The internet boom of the 2000s aligned perfectly with what our company offered, allowing us to grow explosively and even shape a design trend of the era. At the same time, the reason for our decline was also technological. As devices shifted from PCs to smartphones, preferences moved away from complex, decorative, visually rich imagery toward simplified, minimal interfaces—sometimes even with no imagery at all. In that environment, our images had reached the end of their lifespan. They disappeared.
Still, what gives us hope now is that smartphone performance has improved tremendously. Today, there is virtually no technical burden in displaying large, detailed images on mobile devices. So I sometimes wonder whether things might eventually return in some form.
YY: I agree. That is partly why I am conducting this research as well.
CS: I think there is a strong possibility that highly decorative and visually rich imagery will return. The issue, however, is that humans may no longer be the ones producing it. If someone simply references Asadal images in an AI prompt, they could generate a hundred similar images instantly. Machines can produce them faster and at a far greater scale than people. In that sense, hiring one or two hundred designers as we once did no longer seems like a viable strategy.
The Appeal of Optimism
YY: I noticed that the company philosophy was “A Creative and Innovative Enterprise, an Internet Company in the Global World.”
CS: That philosophy was created because of all this. We did not establish it when the company first started. We defined it around our tenth anniversary, when the design mall was at the peak of its success. At the time, we even received awards from government ministries and recognition from the president.
The first principle was to be a customer-centered service company. Because, in truth, designers did not create these successful designs—the customers did. Customers were constantly voting, invisibly. We uploaded hundreds or thousands of images, and if something received almost no downloads, it meant customers simply did not want it. Our greatest teacher was the customer—not professors in doctoral design programs, but customers themselves.
The second principle was to be a creative and innovative enterprise. We did not want to merely follow customers. Instead, we wanted to introduce new and creative ideas first—innovative designs that customers would then respond to.
The final principle was that we would not limit ourselves to business in Korea. We wanted to become an internet company in the global world, operating internationally rather than locally.
YY: The images feel very bright, optimistic, and clear. Is there a reason for that? What was the atmosphere like at the time?
CS: At that time, South Korea’s GDP was growing explosively. The internet was expanding rapidly, and people were genuinely filled with dreams, hope, and optimism about the future. It was the period when Korea was becoming a developed country. Before that, we had been considered underdeveloped. We had experienced colonial rule under Japan, and for a long time we had felt as though we were always lagging behind Japan and Western powers.
Our slogan at the time was: “We may have been late to industrialization, but we will lead in informatization.”6 The idea was that while Korea may have lagged behind in industrial development, it could move ahead in information technology and the internet. In many ways, that ambition became reality, and Korea eventually surpassed Japan and parts of Europe in areas of digital infrastructure and internet adoption. This was a moment when things felt reversed.
During this period, Korea invested heavily in building internet infrastructure. Through successful network communication between Seoul National University and ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), Korea established the foundation for the internet as the second country in the world after the United States. Later, the Kim Dae-jung (김대중) administration actively promoted venture businesses and expanded internet infrastructure.
From our perspective at the time, Korea still felt like a poor country, while Japan and Europe seemed wealthy and highly advanced. But as the internet began to take hold, people became genuinely excited and optimistic. Companies experienced explosive growth almost overnight. Naver emerged and rapidly grew into a major corporation, Daum (now Kakao) quickly expanded its influence, and NCSoft’s game Lineage spread rapidly, attracting massive numbers of users worldwide.
When everything around you feels exciting and hopeful, would gloomy images really become popular? Of course not. People downloaded visuals that felt bright, clean, optimistic, energetic, glamorous, and hopeful. We responded to that atmosphere, created images that matched the spirit of the moment, and because they sold well, a cycle formed. Eventually, what people came to recognize as the “Asadal style” solidified.
YY: I was born in 1996, and by the time I got my first computer, it was already the Windows XP era. I remember seeing Asadal images everywhere across the Korean web. They make up a large part of my internet memories, and somehow they bring back that same sense of excitement I felt while browsing the web at the time.
CS: So only a few years after you were born, you had already become a citizen of a developed country. I, on the other hand, was born into an agricultural society. Korea was once ranked near the bottom in GDP—even poorer than North Korea, some people said—and then suddenly became a developed nation. From our perspective as image-makers, we could not help but create bright and uplifting visuals. Those images reflected the spirit of the era: future-oriented, optimistic, and full of possibility.
Asadal’s imagery would not have suited periods such as the COVID era, for example, when society felt anxious, isolated, and closed off. In dark historical moments, optimistic imagery like ours does not resonate in the same way.
But these days, Korea seems to be doing well again across the technology sector, from AI to semiconductors with companies like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. If this continues, I imagine people may once again seek brighter and more visually rich imagery.
AI and the Stock Photography Model
YY: I understand that Asadal has also been pursuing AI-related business. How is that progressing? Are you planning to continue operating the design mall through AI?
CS: We are investing heavily in AI at the moment. The company has grown quite significantly—we now have around five affiliated companies and approximately 270 employees. We still have a company in China, but our relationship with North Korea ended for political reasons, and things in Japan have become rather inactive.
At this point, I think image creation is no longer really a human task. There is no longer any need to download assets either. People can simply generate images instantly using AI and use them directly on the spot. Back then, stock photography was dominated by Western models. There were very few Korean model images available. Celebrity photographs were too expensive for ordinary businesses to use, so companies needed photos of unknown models instead. We hired more than one hundred male and female models and photographed them over several years, using those images as source material.
But now, there is no longer a need to cast models because AI can produce images that are even better than reality. The world has completely changed. The difference between the pre-AI and post-AI era feels like two entirely separate worlds. Because of this, I no longer think our former strategy—creating and selling stock image resources in the traditional way—fits the present era.
Corporate Archiving
YY: Asadal seems to have an enormous archive of materials. I was wondering whether the company has been preserving them internally. Relying only on the website feels unstable.
CS: We burned the data onto CDs and displayed hundreds of them in storage cabinets. Naturally, we also created backup copies and stored them separately, and everything remains on our servers as well. We still have all the materials, but now they are largely considered outdated images, so we mainly preserve them for archival and historical purposes.
YY: I also noticed that some Asadal images were made freely available through Gongu Madang, the public sharing platform.
CS: Yes, that came from a proposal by the Korea Copyright Commission. Because Asadal designs were so widely copyrighted, there were growing social problems caused by unauthorized use. They asked whether we would consider donating some of the materials.
So we donated image assets worth several hundred million won to the Commission, and those materials were uploaded to Gongu Madang and made available for free. They were not recent works—we selected mostly early images that had sold particularly well and donated only a portion of them. Everything else on Asadal still requires payment to download and use.
Frutiger Aero and the Future of Aesthetics
YY: Has anyone ever contacted Asadal directly regarding Frutiger Aero?
CS: Not from academia. There were many inquiries from journalists and broadcasters, but I do not think we had any from students or graduate researchers. Most inquiries were about Asadal as a company. Nobody approached us specifically regarding “Frutiger Aero.” At the time, that term did not even exist.
YY: Yes, that’s right. Frutiger Aero is a relatively recent term used to describe this aesthetic. A researcher named Sofi Xian first coined the term and has continued researching the aesthetic ever since. She has been especially curious about Asadal’s history and visual imagery. She recently visited China and told me that she came across Asadal mural imagery in Shenzhen.
CS: Do you know how widespread Asadal images became in China? Once, I landed at Beijing Airport and saw a massive advertising billboard, about fifty meters long, and the entire billboard had been created using Asadal images. Then I took a taxi through the city on my way to the hotel and saw Asadal images again on large roadside billboards. When I arrived at the hotel, I even saw our images in the lobby. During that single business trip to China, I must have encountered our images hundreds of times.
YY: Could you immediately recognize them as Asadal images?
CS: Of course. We recognize them instantly. The strange thing was, I do not remember us ever officially selling those images in China or receiving proper payment for them. They had spread largely through illegal downloads. At the time, China was also experiencing explosive economic growth under Deng Xiaoping’s (邓小平) reforms. The country was opening itself to Western technology and capital, joining the WTO, and integrating into the global system. Things changed almost overnight. Within just a few years, living standards seemed to double. In that environment, our imagery fit perfectly. The spirit of the era aligned with the direction our visuals were aiming toward.
Our images spread rapidly throughout China, but unfortunately, much of that happened through piracy. We hired lawyers and contacted companies, sending legal notices saying: “The image you are using is unauthorized. It was created by Asadal, and licensing fees must be paid.” But many responded with receipts, insisting: “No, we purchased this legally.” The problem was that they had unknowingly bought pirated copies from illegal distributors—at around one-tenth of our original price. They simply copied our source files and resold them. I saw similar cases in Vietnam as well. Across much of Asia, our images spread everywhere.
In any case, Asadal aligned perfectly with the historical momentum of the time. Korea’s web market was growing explosively, and we essentially came to dominate it. That energy naturally pushed us overseas. At the same time, many Asian economies were rapidly expanding, and our imagery resonated strongly with that moment. Recently, our images seem to be especially well received in Taiwan. The number one stock image company in Taiwan has partnered with Asadal, and our images are still generating strong sales through that partnership today.
YY: Younger generations today seem to experience this aesthetic with nostalgia, while it is also becoming fashionable again. What do you think about that phenomenon?
CS: Since AI may lead to another wave of economic transformation, I think styles like this could certainly return. However, even if the visuals look similar, the creator will probably no longer be human. AI can already generate images in an Asadal-like style very quickly. But AI still needs references—it cannot create without examples. I imagine people will increasingly prompt AI to generate visuals inspired by the Asadal aesthetic. At the same time, copyright enforcement in this situation becomes extremely difficult. Rather than fighting endless legal battles, we are beginning to think: perhaps we should simply use AI ourselves.
If you look broadly at human history, the agricultural revolution during the Neolithic period was one of humanity’s greatest transformations. After centuries of traditional society, the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Britain gave rise to modern civilization. Then, in the twentieth century, came computers, the internet, and mobile technology—and now, finally, AI. I believe the AI revolution may be comparable to the Industrial Revolution, perhaps even ten times more socially transformative.
And I think AI may naturally gravitate toward visual styles like ours. Just as the early internet era favored bright, optimistic, and clean aesthetics, AI imagery often feels futuristic, technological, digital, surreal, cybernetic, and dreamlike. In many ways, the emotional atmosphere of AI-generated imagery resembles the feeling we once tried to create at Asadal. If AI begins producing these kinds of visuals at scale, perhaps this style will become popular again. Or perhaps a completely new visual language will emerge for the AI era—one that still references or transforms our style in some way.
Today, AI-generated imagery is no longer limited to static images; it is increasingly expanding into video as well. I think there is a strong possibility that this will evolve into short-form content. In the past, adding movement to images was difficult. It was expensive, and at most we could only apply limited effects through technologies like Flash. But now, images can easily be transformed into ten-second videos. For example, if you input an image and ask AI to turn it into a video, motion can be generated naturally at relatively low cost and in a very short amount of time—a seagull might begin flying, or the globe might start rotating.7
What’s in a name?
YY: Finally, why did you choose the name “Asadal”?
CS: “Asadal” is an old Korean word meaning “the land of the morning.” It was said to be the capital of Gojoseon (朝鮮), the earliest Korean kingdom. Just as Korean history began there, we wanted Asadal to mark the beginning of a new era: the era of the internet. The name represented beginnings, origins, and being first.
The three-legged crow in our logo appears frequently in Goguryeo tomb murals. It symbolizes a mediator between the sun in the heavens and humanity on earth. In mythology, it represents kingship, absolute power, and the sun itself. Goguryeo was the largest of the Three Kingdoms, and it represented outward expansion and cultural strength. That symbolism matched the image we wanted to project as a company, which is why we adopted it as our logo. 🐟
Transcript has been translated from Korean by Yunseon Yang and sparsely edited for clarity and flow.
Yunseon Yang is a multidisciplinary graphic designer from Korea, based in Germany, exploring digital culture and visual aesthetics. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Visual Communication at Bauhaus University with a graduation project focused on the Frutiger Aero aesthetic.
KoyoKim, “창업 후 14년에 대한 회고 - (주)아사달 서창녕 대표”, Youtube, 17 April 2013.
100 million won was equivalent to roughly 107,000 USD or 80,000 EUR in 2007. This is approximately 172,000 USD or 121,000 EUR in 2026.
ETNEWS, “[2007 First Half Popular Products] Quality Excellence – Design Content: Asadal ‘Design Content’” [[2007 상반기 인기상품] 품질우수 – 디자인콘텐츠: 아사달 ‘디자인콘텐츠’], 26 June 2007. https://www.etnews.com/200706220090.
10 million won ≈ 10,700 USD / 8,000 EUR in 2007 (≈17,000 USD / 12,000 EUR in 2026 value).
The Sunshine Policy, officially the Reconciliation and Cooperation Policy Towards the North (대북화해협력정책), was a South Korean policy from the late 1990s to the late 2000s that encouraged inter-Korean exchange and cooperation.
“산업화는 늦었지만, 정보화는 앞서가자.” This is the slogan of Korea’s informatization movement in 1995.
Money Today, “Asadal Adds Image-Based AI Video Generation Feature to ‘AI Pro’” [아사달, ‘AI프로’에 이미지 기반 AI 동영상 생성 기능 추가], 29 July 2025. https://www.mt.co.kr/industry/2025/07/29/2025072913224738025
