The Seoul-based food experience design studio creates workshops, installations and research projects that explore how cooking and eating can bring people closer together.
There’s a photo in Small Batch Studio’s archive of two strangers holding opposite ends of a 3.6-metre length of string, a teabag knotted along its length, both of them pulling gently until the distance between them feels right. It looks like a party game. It’s actually a piece of research – and it tells you plenty about how this Seoul-based studio thinks about food, which is to say: not as something you eat, but as something you use to measure a relationship.
Founded in 2016 by Eunkyung Kang, who trained first in visual communication and fashion in Korea before moving to London – “the city of my idols: Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen” – Small Batch Studio is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, still working from the same conviction that shaped its very first projects: that food is never really the problem. “It is we humans who have problems,” the founder tells us. “We forget this all the time and blame food. I always emphasise that how we eat is more important than what we eat.”
After a spell working as an illustrator in London led to burnout, a visit to Laines Organic Farm in Haywards Heath changed everything for Eunkyung. “I immediately fell in love with nature, farming and cooking,” Eunkyung explains. An MA in Sequential Design/Illustration at Brighton followed, alongside a farm-diary project called Frozen Fingers and Dirty Sleeves, and an internship at Dutch eating-designer Marije Vogelzang’s studio-restaurant Proef in Amsterdam, which sealed the deal, showing how food experience design could be an actual job.
The Connecting Tea project, mentioned at the beginning of this article, is the studio’s clearest thesis. It involves two participants pulling that length of string taut and brewing tea at whatever distance they’ve settled on, then measuring it against Edward Hall’s theory of proxemics to reveal, quite literally, how close they are. “Connecting Tea brings people closer together physically, emotionally and socially,” says Eunkyung, and having run the workshop across Korea and Japan since 2018, it’s become something of an icebreaker classic.
Elsewhere, Recipes Are on the Map takes a more diaristic approach. Handwritten recipes are laid over maps to trace the wandering, unfixed nature of migrant identity – an idea sparked, fittingly, by a month spent wandering the English coast, foraging in Brighton and stumbling into human geography researchers on a field trip in Totnes. Back home in Seoul, where 40% of residents live alone, most of them migrants from elsewhere in Korea, the project takes on real weight. “I believe food can be a powerful social tool of sympathy and diversity,” the founder says, “because it reflects who I am and who we live with.”
When it comes to the creative process, ideation happens through hand-drawn experience journey maps and toolkits built in fluorescent colours that you won’t often find in nature – a deliberate flag of “human intervention in the food experience”. You see it everywhere in the imagery: a chart of Korean wheat flavours rendered in a wheel of hot, unnatural hues; heirloom tomatoes illustrated in inky reds and acid greens for a Gangwon-do farm project; a tide calendar stretched out like an EKG in cobalt blue. Even the studio’s newest identity, a red hand stamped with the words ‘son-mat’ – a Korean phrase meaning “hand-taste”, the intuitive, seasoned sense a cook develops through years at the stove – turns up as an embroidered patch and looks like a logo.
That project, launched this year, is where the studio is headed next. Alongside Foodscape Tongyeong, a residency-style programme introducing overseas audiences to the coastal city’s foraging, markets, and disappearing food traditions, the founder is now researching recipes as a form of manual to teach people and develop their ‘son-mat’ senses. “This will not only guide us in cooking better but also awaken our senses and live with non-humans through the everyday practice of cooking.” 10 years in, Small Batch Studio is still asking the same question it started with: not what we should eat, but how – and who, exactly, we’re eating it with.
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