Ferrari Tailor Made 12Cilindri for South Korea Unveiled
Ferrari has unveiled the new Tailor Made 12Cilindri, which celebrates the pinnacle of craftsmanship within its flagship personalisation programme. This unique Ferrari raises the bar again with an interpretation of road-going art created exclusively for the South Korean market. It features several elements that draw on tradition and follow innovation.
This extraordinary Tailor-Made vehicle is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration across three continents. Asia contributes the artisanal mastery of five young South Korean artists who act as ambassadors of their local heritage: Daehye Jeong, Hyunhee Kim, GRAYCODE, jiiiiin, and TaeHyun Lee. Europe contributes Ferrari’s Styling Centre, and North America contributes the vision and expertise of COOL HUNTING®, the award-winning independent publication dedicated to the latest intersections of design, culture and technology.
Over nearly two years, the teams tackled exciting challenges and blended Ferrari’s legendary engineering and design expertise with COOL HUNTING®’S creative vision. They translated Korea’s vibrant artistic and cultural energy into a one-of-a-kind creation from the Prancing Horse.
This 12Cilindri stands out instantly thanks to its new transitional Yoonseul paint scheme, explicitly developed for this project. Korean tradition inspires this unique colour and fuses regional history and heritage with cues from Celadon ceramics, with their many shades of green. It also channels the allure of cosmopolitan Seoul, which pulses to the rhythm of K-pop, electronic music, and the neon lights of the city’s future-focused districts. The finish delivers a vivid, iridescent effect that shifts from green to violet with blue highlights. It recalls sparkling sunlight on the sea, Yoonseul in Korean.
Artist Dahye Jeong revisits traditional horsehair weaving through her practice. Jeong won the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2022 and has earned international acclaim in textile craftsmanship and fibre art. She creates hand-woven works with extraordinary fineness, lightness, and transparency that appear to float in the air. Her creations, which include baskets, containers and abstract forms, interact with light and shadow and evoke delicacy, spirituality, and a refined contemporary sensibility.
This one-of-a-kind Tailor-Made Ferrari features Jeong’s work in several ways. The seats, floor and soft surfaces use fabric that carries one of her iconic patterns, which a South Korean company brought to life in a new 3-D fabric and Ferrari used for the first time. The 12Cilindri also uses that pattern on the glass roof, where a screen-printed treatment creates the same interplay of shadows and projections as light passes through, a first for Ferrari. Most iconically, the dashboard displays a hand-woven work made from Mongolian horsehair, which suppliers certified by the local Chamber of Commerce provided. This detail allows the interior to integrate an artwork into the vehicle itself. The Ferrari Styling Centre and R&D team worked closely with creative partners to achieve these firsts.
Hyunhee Kim innovates with materials and reinterprets traditional Korean objects through a critical contemporary lens. She crafts her well-known Korean wedding trousseaus in ethereal, semi-translucent acrylic, bringing new life to their role as “containers of memories.” Kim often creates transparent objects and sometimes suspends them in space to evoke lightness and fragility while crafting an immersive, dreamlike environment. Several prestigious prizes have recognised her work, including the Cheongju International Craft Award and the Iksan National Craft Award.
Kim’s translucent work appears throughout the vehicle’s exterior. It features the distinctive Scuderia Ferrari shields, wheel caps, the long F nameplate, and the Prancing Horse, and it represents a level of customisation that a Tailor Made vehicle has not offered before. The interior includes a bespoke modification to the centre tunnel that carries the same translucent effect. It also consists of a handmade dedication plate featuring the project’s name in traditional calligraphy by the artist.
Kim also created a traditional case for valuable and meaningful items for the body of this 12Cilindri. The collector can use it as a luggage case. The piece also includes an object in the form of a Ferrari key that Kim customised to her visual language so that the owner can experience her varied and original practices in full.
White becomes the leitmotif for several interior and exterior elements, and TaeHyun Lee’s artistic research inspires this approach. Lee works in contemporary art and often uses traditional Korean techniques, including lacquer, which he reinterprets in a modern context through his white lacquer. He uses a highly complex technique. His works often combine modern materials with lacquer, creating glossy, reflective surfaces with striking visual impact. Through lacquer, Lee explores layering, depth, and the transformation of matter. He bridges Korean artisanal tradition with the language of contemporary art. His vision led Ferrari to create the 12Cilindri’s unique white brake callipers, which marked a first for a factory-made Ferrari, and it also informed the car’s white shift paddles.
Electronic music sets the rhythm for this Ferrari’s exterior livery through the meticulous work of GRAYCODE, jiiiiin. This South Korean sound and performance artist duo has earned renown for performances and installations that explore sound, space, and the intersection of technology and art. They visualised the iconic Ferrari V12 sound and translated it into a visual artwork, which Maranello’s artisans rendered on the bodywork. The team created visual depth in the livery with the same transitional paint, in a shade that runs one step darker. Ferrari has applied this new, unique treatment to this car for the first time.
Evan Orensten and Josh Rubin, the creative minds behind COOL HUNTING®, inspired and coordinated the artists’ work alongside JaeEun “Jane” Lee, who served as the project’s curator. They worked closely with Ferrari’s design and R&D teams throughout the process.
