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 appears to be like like a celebration sport. It is really a chunk of analysis – and it tells you loads about how this Seoul-based studio thinks about meals, which is to say: not as one thing you eat, however as one thing you utilize to measure a relationship.
Based in 2016 by Eunkyung Kang, who skilled first in visible communication and style in Korea earlier than transferring to London – “town of my idols: Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen” – Small Batch Studio is celebrating its tenth anniversary this yr, nonetheless working from the identical conviction that formed its very first tasks: that meals is rarely actually the issue. “It’s we people who’ve issues,” the founder tells us. “We neglect this on a regular basis and blame meals. I all the time emphasise that how we eat is extra essential 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 every little thing 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 undertaking 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 undertaking, talked about in the beginning of this text, is the studio’s clearest thesis. It includes two members pulling that size of string taut and brewing tea at no matter distance they’ve settled on, then measuring it towards Edward Corridor’s concept 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 change 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 identification – an thought sparked, fittingly, by a month spent wandering the English coast, foraging in Brighton and stumbling into human geography researchers on a discipline journey in Totnes. Again residence in Seoul, the place 40% of residents reside alone, most of them migrants from elsewhere in Korea, the undertaking takes on actual weight. “I imagine meals generally is a highly effective social device of sympathy and variety,” the founder says, “as a result of it displays who I’m and who we reside with.”
With regards to the artistic course of, ideation occurs via hand-drawn expertise journey maps and toolkits in-built fluorescent colors that you just will not usually discover in nature – a deliberate flag of “human intervention within the meals expertise”. You see it in all places 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 undertaking; a tide calendar stretched out like an EKG in cobalt blue. Even the studio’s latest identification, a purple hand stamped with the phrases ‘son-mat’ – a Korean phrase which means “hand-taste”, the intuitive, seasoned sense a cook dinner develops via years on the range – turns up as an embroidered patch and appears like a brand.
That undertaking, launched this yr, 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 handbook to show individuals and develop their ‘son-mat’ senses. “This won’t solely information us in cooking higher but in addition awaken our senses and reside with non-humans via the on a regular basis apply of cooking.” 10 years in, Small Batch Studio continues to be asking the identical query it began with: not what we must always eat, however how – and who, precisely, we’re consuming it with.
