There is a photograph in Small Batch Studio’s archive of two strangers holding reverse ends of a 3.6-metre size of string, a teabag knotted alongside its size, each of them pulling gently till the space between them feels proper. It seems like a celebration sport. It is really a bit of analysis – and it tells you a lot about how this Seoul-based studio thinks about meals, which is to say: not as one thing you eat, however as one thing you employ to measure a relationship.
Based in 2016 by Eunkyung Kang, who educated first in visible communication and style in Korea earlier than shifting to London – “town of my idols: Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen” – Small Batch Studio is celebrating its tenth anniversary this 12 months, nonetheless working from the identical conviction that formed its very first initiatives: that meals isn’t actually the issue. “It’s we people who’ve issues,” the founder tells us. “We overlook this on a regular basis and blame meals. I all the time emphasise that how we eat is extra necessary than what we eat.”
After a spell working as an illustrator in London led to burnout, a go to to Laines Natural Farm in Haywards Heath modified the whole lot for Eunkyung. “I instantly fell in love with nature, farming and cooking,” Eunkyung explains. An MA in Sequential Design/Illustration at Brighton adopted, alongside a farm-diary venture referred to as Frozen Fingers and Soiled Sleeves, and an internship at Dutch eating-designer Marije Vogelzang’s studio-restaurant Proef in Amsterdam, which sealed the deal, exhibiting how meals expertise design might be an precise job.
The Connecting Tea venture, talked about in the beginning of this text, is the studio’s clearest thesis. It entails two contributors pulling that size of string taut and brewing tea at no matter distance they’ve settled on, then measuring it in opposition to Edward Corridor’s idea of proxemics to disclose, fairly actually, how shut they’re. “Connecting Tea brings individuals nearer collectively bodily, emotionally and socially,” says Eunkyung, and having run the workshop throughout Korea and Japan since 2018, it is turn into one thing of an icebreaker basic.
Elsewhere, Recipes Are on the Map takes a extra diaristic method. Handwritten recipes are laid over maps to hint the wandering, unfixed nature of migrant id – an concept sparked, fittingly, by a month spent wandering the English coast, foraging in Brighton and stumbling into human geography researchers on a subject journey in Totnes. Again dwelling in Seoul, the place 40% of residents reside alone, most of them migrants from elsewhere in Korea, the venture takes on actual weight. “I imagine meals could be a highly effective social software of sympathy and variety,” the founder says, “as a result of it displays who I’m and who we reside with.”
On the subject of the artistic course of, ideation occurs by means of hand-drawn expertise journey maps and toolkits inbuilt fluorescent colors that you simply will not usually discover in nature – a deliberate flag of “human intervention within the meals expertise”. You see it all over the place within the imagery: a chart of Korean wheat flavours rendered in a wheel of sizzling, unnatural hues; heirloom tomatoes illustrated in inky reds and acid greens for a Gangwon-do farm venture; a tide calendar stretched out like an EKG in cobalt blue. Even the studio’s latest id, a crimson hand stamped with the phrases ‘son-mat’ – a Korean phrase that means “hand-taste”, the intuitive, seasoned sense a prepare dinner develops by means of years on the range – turns up as an embroidered patch and appears like a brand.
That venture, launched this 12 months, is the place the studio is headed subsequent. Alongside Foodscape Tongyeong, a residency-style programme introducing abroad audiences to the coastal metropolis’s foraging, markets, and disappearing meals traditions, the founder is now researching recipes as a type of guide to show individuals and develop their ‘son-mat’ senses. “This won’t solely information us in cooking higher but additionally awaken our senses and reside with non-humans by means of the on a regular basis follow of cooking.” 10 years in, Small Batch Studio continues to be asking the identical query it began with: not what we should always eat, however how – and who, precisely, we’re consuming it with.
