Hapjeong Taste Hall: Where Inspiration Lived Until It Didn't
The closing of Hapjeong Taste Hall — a membership cultural space in Seoul that was genuinely ahead of its time. Notes on a place that lived up to what it promised.
Taste Hall in Hapjeong closed in early 2023.
It was a membership cultural space — a three-story building near Hapjeong station in Seoul that functioned simultaneously as a bar, a gallery, a studio rental space, a meeting room, and the headquarters of a community built around the idea that people with interesting taste should have a place to find each other.
I'd been a member for a few years without being a particularly active one. When I heard it was closing, I went back.
What the Space Did
The first floor was a bar that doubled as a gallery. The changing work on the walls was usually interesting, occasionally excellent. The bar was not expensive, the lighting was good, and the music was always something I hadn't heard before.
The second and third floors had studio spaces the founders called "ateliers" — rooms members had used as recording spaces, painting studios, workshops. People had released albums from there. Exhibitions had started in those rooms. The space didn't take credit for what happened inside it; it just made itself available.
The Problem With Spaces Like This
The Taste Hall project was never quite sustainable. The economics of building a space where what you're really selling is the possibility of serendipitous connection — where the value is atmospheric and social rather than transactional — are genuinely difficult.
In Seoul, the alternative use value of commercial real estate in Hapjeong is high and rising. Every year the space existed was a year the founders chose it over something more financially straightforward.
What Remains
The chairs and desks were being given away. I had a moment of temptation.
What doesn't go away: the fact that it existed. For its duration, it was one of the few places in Seoul that took seriously the proposition that a city should have places designed for the possibility of interesting things happening rather than for the efficient delivery of a service.
Some of the projects it housed have continued. Some of the connections it made have lasted. The building will be something else.
That's how it goes.