About Leonard Koren

Leonard Koren (°1948, New York) is an American artist, aesthetics expert and writer living in San Francisco Bay Area. After graduating from UCLA with a Master's Degree in Architecture and Urban Planning in 1972, he started organising bath events, creating particular bathing environments, and producing paper works about bathing. In 1976 Koren founded WET Magazine dedicated to gourmet bathing. In 1981, he shut down WET magazine and began travelling to Tokyo, where he started writing for a Japanese lifestyle magazine with a bimonthly column titled ‘Dr. Leonardo’s Guide to Cultural Anthropology’. Ever since, writing became omnipresent and making books became his artistic practice. Leonard Koren has published twenty books until today: 17 Beautiful Men Taking a Shower (1975), WET MAGAZINE , the magazine of Gourmet Bathing (1976 – 1981), New Fashion Japan (1984), 283 Useful Ideas from Japan (1988), Graphic Design Cookbook, Mix & Match Recipes for Faster, Better Layouts (1989), Success Stories, (1990), The Hagglers Handbook: One Hour to Negotiating Power (1991), Noise Reduction: A Ten-Minute Meditation for Quieting the Mind (1992), How to Take a Japanese Bath (1992), How to Rake Leaves (1993), Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (1994), Undesigning the Bath (1996), Gardens of Gravel and Sand (2000), 13 Books (2001), Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement (2003), The Flower Shop: Charm Grace Beauty, Tenderness in a Commercial Context (2005), Which "Aesthetics" Do You Mean?: Ten Definitions (2010), Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing (2012) Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts (2015) and What Artists Do (2018).