#shimiiru

작업실 — On Having a Place to Make Things

The making matters before the made.

Every person who makes things needs a place to make them.
This sounds obvious, but it is not quite as simple as it appears. The place does not need to be large. It does not need to be specially designed or professionally equipped. But it needs to be known — a specific location, a defined space, a place that has an agreement with you about what happens there. Without that, the making tends to happen intermittently, apologetically, always slightly displaced by other things that have a clearer claim on the available surfaces.

The studio — 작업실, jageopsil, literally “work room” — is that agreement made physical. Here, and not elsewhere, is where the work happens.

What the Studio Is and Is Not
The studio is not defined by its size. Some of the most serious making I know of happens at kitchen tables and in corners of bedrooms and in small dedicated rooms that would barely qualify as large closets by other standards. The room itself is almost beside the point. What matters is the stability of it — that the space has been claimed, that the tools have a home in it, that you know where to go when you want to work.
A studio that has to be assembled before each session and disassembled afterward is much harder to maintain than one that simply exists, ready, waiting for you to return. The time and energy spent setting up is time and energy not spent making. More than that, the friction of assembling the space creates a barrier between you and the work that costs more than its literal minutes. You sit down on a free afternoon and instead of beginning, you arrange. The arranging takes time. By the time it is done the hour has shifted, something else has come up, and you will try again tomorrow.

The studio resolves this. It stays. The threads are where you left them. The tools are on the shelf where they belong. The unfinished work is on the table, slightly reproachful, waiting. You can sit down and begin.

Mine
My studio is a small room, or the better part of a room, or a corner that has been allowed to expand until it has become its own territory. I am not entirely sure which.
There is a table — longer than it needs to be for the work itself, which is a luxury, because the extra length means there is room for things to accumulate on one end while the work actually happens on the other. This turns out to matter. Making things generates a kind of material debris: cut threads, remnants of fabric, reference images clipped from somewhere, tools that were in use and have not yet been returned to their places. If you give this debris nowhere to go, it migrates onto the work surface and the work surface becomes unavailable. The extra length is a form of hospitality extended to the process.
There is natural light in the morning, which is when I work best. There is a shelf with the threads — organized, approximately, by color, in a way that made complete sense when I organized them and now requires some interpretation to navigate. There are tools whose specific functions would require explanation for anyone who does not do this kind of work, and whose presence, to me, is as ordinary and necessary as a writer’s pen or a cook’s knife.

There is a cup that should probably be returned to the kitchen but has been on the corner of the table long enough to have become a permanent resident. There are two projects at different stages — one I am actively working on, and one I started, set aside, and have not yet decided whether to finish. Both of these are entirely normal states for a studio to be in.

The Accumulation
Studios accumulate things, and what collects there tells a partial story of the work.
The unfinished project in the corner is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of judgment — the recognition, at some point, that this particular piece had taken a direction that was not working, and that the right response was to pause rather than push through. Sometimes pieces wait in that paused state for weeks and reveal what they needed when you look at them fresh. Sometimes they are set aside permanently and become material for something else. Either outcome is a form of completion.
The reference image pinned to the wall that has been there for three months is not clutter. It is an ongoing question. Something about it is still useful — a color, a texture, a way of handling a border — and taking it down would mean making a decision about it that you are not yet ready to make. Leaving it up means keeping the question open. Keeping questions open is sometimes exactly the right thing to do.
The notes on scraps of paper are more ambiguous. Some of them are ideas that turned into work. Some are ideas that never developed. Most are impossible to tell apart, because early ideas look identical to ideas that will never go anywhere. You keep them for a while. Eventually you know.

All of this accumulation is the studio doing its job — holding the work at every stage, including the stages that do not look like much from the outside.

On Showing Up
The studio’s most important function is not organization or storage or even the quality of its light. It is what it represents: a place you have committed to returning to.
Making things is not reliably inspired. There are sessions when everything comes together — when the work develops with an ease that makes you feel like you have simply been transcribing something that already existed, waiting to be noticed. These sessions are extraordinary and cannot be scheduled. They tend to arrive when you have been working consistently enough to be present when they do.
The other sessions — the ones that are effortful, slow, halting, productive mostly of frustration — are where most of the work actually happens. The piece that takes shape across many difficult afternoons is built primarily from those afternoons, not from the one afternoon when it came easily. The easy afternoon is the reward. The difficult ones are the material.
Returning to the studio on difficult days requires a reason that has nothing to do with how the session might go. The reason is simply that this is where you go, and you go, and you work, and you see what happens.

The studio makes this possible by being there. By being specifically, reliably, always the place. By holding the unfinished work and keeping it ready. By providing, through its mere existence as the known place of making, a context in which it is natural to begin.

Permission
If the studio gives you one thing above all others, it is permission.
Permission to start before you are confident it will work. Permission to produce something imperfect and learn from it. Permission to take the process seriously before there is anything to show for it — before the finished piece exists, before you can point to something and say: this is why the time was worth spending.
Making things is fundamentally an act of faith. You commit hours and material and attention to a process whose outcome is not guaranteed. You sit down with thread and fabric and a tool and a rough sense of what you are trying to make, and you begin. Sometimes what emerges corresponds to what you imagined. Sometimes it does not. Either way, something has been learned that could not have been learned without the attempt.

The studio is the physical space that supports this act of faith. It says: this is a legitimate use of time. It says: the work is happening here. It says: come back tomorrow, because what was started today is still here, waiting.

The Making Itself
There is a specific satisfaction in making things with your hands that is difficult to find elsewhere.
It is not the satisfaction of a finished product, though that is real. It is something more continuous — the quality of attention required to work with physical materials, the feedback loop between hand and eye and material that requires you to be entirely present in the moment of the work. You cannot make a stitch while thinking about something else. The stitch will show what you were thinking about. The work requires your full attention, and receiving that requirement — the obligation to be here, now, doing this — turns out to be, more often than not, a relief.
In a life full of abstract problems and deferred outcomes and digital work that leaves no physical trace, making something you can hold is its own argument for the value of the process. Here is the thing. I made it. It exists.
The making matters before the made.
Every studio is proof of that.

반찬 — The Small Dishes That Are the Whole Point

No single dish is the star. That is the whole point.

When you sit down at a Korean restaurant, the food arrives before you order.

You have barely opened the menu. Maybe you have not even looked at it yet. And already the table is filling — small dish after small dish appearing from nowhere, covering the surface in front of you, creating a landscape of ceramic bowls before you have made a single decision about what you want to eat.

If this is your first time at a Korean table, you might glance around to see if there has been some mistake. There has not.

These are the 반찬, banchan. And once you understand what they are — and what they are not — you will never look at a meal quite the same way again.

What Banchan Are

Banchan are not appetizers. They are not the Korean version of bread before the main course, or chips and dip to keep you occupied while the kitchen works. They are not side dishes in the sense that a side salad is a side dish — secondary, subordinate, something you eat around the edges of the real thing.

Banchan are the real thing. More precisely, they are the table itself — the living, ongoing collection of small dishes that surrounds the rice and soup at the center of a Korean meal. The specific dishes shift with the season, the region, the cook, and the occasion. But the structure never changes. Many small things. Arranged together. Eaten in rotation. Each one adjusting, balancing, deepening the others.

Consider what might appear. Spinach blanched until just tender, then dressed in sesame oil and a little garlic — soft and nutty, barely seasoned. Radish sliced into fine matchsticks and pickled bright with vinegar and sugar, sharp and clean against the tongue. Dried anchovies pan-fried with soy sauce and a touch of honey until they are glazed and faintly crisp at the edges. Bean sprouts, simply dressed. A small mound of braised lotus root — dark, sweet, yielding. And kimchi, always kimchi, which is less a single dish than an entire category of its own, appearing in a dozen forms depending on who made it and when.

This is a modest spread. At a restaurant known for its generosity, or in a home where the cooking is taken seriously, the table might hold twelve dishes, or fifteen. Each one different in color, texture, temperature, and flavor. All of them, together, comprising a single meal.

The Rule About Refills

Here is the part that stops most first-time visitors cold: banchan are refillable. Free of charge. Without being asked.

You finish the spinach — more spinach appears. You work through the kimchi — someone brings more kimchi. The table does not empty as the meal progresses. It replenishes. The dishes that run low are quietly replaced, and the meal continues at the same abundance with which it began.

To someone accustomed to restaurant dining where every item is measured, portioned, and priced, this can feel genuinely disorienting. And then — within minutes — quite wonderful. The meal is not organized around scarcity. Running out of something before you are done eating is not a state the table is designed to reach.

In Korea, none of this registers as remarkable. Of course there is more when you finish. Why would there not be? The logic works from the opposite direction: it is not that refills are provided as a generous extra, but that allowing the table to run empty before the meal is over would be a failure of hospitality so basic it barely needs naming.

That difference — a meal designed around abundance rather than portions — changes the entire feeling of eating.

The Table as Conversation

Once the initial surprise settles, something else becomes clear: the banchan are not just many dishes. They are a system. And the system has its own logic.

Korean food is not built around a single centerpiece surrounded by lesser supporting elements. There is no hierarchy at the Korean table, no star, no main event that everything else serves. The meal is structured more like a conversation — many voices present at once, none trying to dominate, meaning emerging from how they play against each other rather than from any one of them alone.

You eat in rotation. A bite of the braised tofu, then a spoonful of rice, then kimchi, then perhaps the spinach, then back. No one tells you the order. There is no correct sequence. The banchan are simply present, all of them, and you move between them as the meal develops. The pairings are personal and intuitive, and they shift as your appetite changes.

This creates something a single-entrée meal cannot: flavor distributed across time. The sourness of the kimchi cuts through richness. The sesame spinach settles the salt of the anchovy. The sweetness of the lotus root arrives exactly when you want a pause. The table feels calibrated — though it was never consciously designed that way. It is the product of a culinary tradition working out, over centuries, how flavors should move through a meal.

The Work That Made It

There is something easy to miss in all of this, and it has to do with who made the banchan — and what it took.

A Korean meal of real quality requires considerable preparation that happens largely out of sight. Kimchi ferments for days, weeks, sometimes months. Braised dishes need time on the stove. Preserved and dried items are prepared well in advance. By the time anyone sits down to eat, the meal has been in progress for longer than the meal itself will last.

None of this is announced. The dishes simply appear, and they are simply good, and the meal proceeds. This invisible labor is part of what banchan are. The number of dishes, their variety, the care that went into each one — all of it communicates something about how the cook regards the people at the table. A spread of twelve carefully prepared banchan is a form of expression that does not require words. It says: you are worth this. I made time for this. Sit down.

That is not a small thing to say without saying it.

Banchan Today

Modern Korean households maintain the banchan tradition differently than they once did. Fewer people prepare a full spread from scratch every day. Ready-made banchan are sold at every supermarket and specialty shop — jars of kimchi, containers of seasoned vegetables, braised side dishes packed and chilled and ready to open. Families buy some and make some, and the balance shifts depending on the day and the season.

But the structure itself persists — many dishes, shared across the table, refilled as needed — because it is, quite simply, a better way to eat. It builds in variety without effort. It slows the meal down. It makes dinner less transactional and more like something happening together. And it allows for something that a single plated dish cannot: the pleasure of moving between flavors, of building a meal out of small decisions made across the course of an hour, of finishing and realizing the food was still interesting at the end.

The kimchi, made well, is extraordinary. The seasoned spinach is worth coming back to. The crispy anchovies are better than they have any right to be. The table is worth sitting down at not only because of what it means, but because of what it tastes like.

No Single Star

The organizing principle of the Korean table — no hierarchy, no centerpiece, no single dish placed above the others — is both an aesthetic choice and a quiet philosophy. A meal as conversation rather than monologue. Something shared rather than individual. Abundance that does not call attention to itself.

It is the accumulated answer of a very long culinary tradition to the question of how people should eat together.

The answer: together, from the same dishes, in rotation, with enough for everyone, and more when it runs out.

No single dish is the star.

That is, in the end, the whole point.

소확행 — The Korean Art of Small, Certain Happiness

You don’t find it. You notice it.

There is a particular kind of happiness that does not announce itself.

It does not arrive with fanfare or follow a long-awaited achievement. It does not require a special occasion, a checked item on a bucket list, or the resolution of some long-standing problem. It is already present in the ordinary texture of a day — in the warmth of something, the smell of something, the small rightness of a moment that could easily have passed without notice. In Korean, there is a word for exactly this. It is 소확행, pronounced soh-hwak-haeng, and once you know it, you will find yourself reaching for it often.

Where the Word Comes From
The phrase was not originally Korean. The writer Haruki Murakami coined it first, in Japanese — 小確幸, shōkakkō — in a 1986 essay titled Afternoon in the Islets of Langerhans. In it, he described the specific pleasure of folding freshly laundered underwear still warm from the dryer, of pulling a cold beer from the refrigerator at the end of a long run. Small, sensory, reliably good.
Korea discovered the phrase, translated it, and gradually made it its own. By the mid-2010s, 소확행 had found its way into everyday Korean speech — appearing in news articles, television programs, social media posts, and the ordinary back-and-forth of conversation. But something shifted slightly in the translation. The Japanese original carries a wistful undercurrent, a sense of finding small consolations in a world that does not always cooperate. The Korean version kept the smallness but leaned more heavily into the certainty. The full phrase is 소소하지만 확실한 행복 — small but certain happiness.

That single word, certain, changes everything about what the concept means.

What “Certain” Actually Means Here
Not surprising happiness — the kind that catches you off guard, that you cannot plan for. Not extraordinary happiness — the variety that requires years of effort, the alignment of many circumstances, and a fair amount of luck. Certain happiness: the kind you can count on. The kind that will be there tomorrow and the day after, because it does not depend on the world being especially generous.
This is the crucial distinction that separates 소확행 from vague ideas about gratitude or contentment. It is not asking you to lower your expectations or make peace with less than you want. It is pointing out something more specific: that there are reliable, repeatable pleasures available to you on any given day, and that most of us simply do not pay enough attention to notice them.

The warm cup in the morning. The right song arriving at the right moment. The first page of a book that immediately pulls you in. A piece of work, however small, that came out exactly the way you meant it to. These are not consolation prizes. They are pleasures with their own weight, their own value, entirely independent of whatever else is going on.

The Specificity of It
One of the things that makes 소확행 a genuinely useful concept, rather than another well-meaning platitude, is its insistence on the specific. The examples people reach for tend to be sensory and precise, not abstract.
Not “time with loved ones,” which is meaningful but too broad to hold in your hands. More like: the half hour on a Sunday afternoon when the whole apartment is quiet and the light through the window is doing something particularly good. The moment you peel back the foil on a brand new jar of something and the seal breaks cleanly. A pen — a specific pen — that writes without any resistance, the way a pen should but rarely does. Your favorite mug, the one that fits your hands exactly right. The smell of rain on concrete just before a summer downpour.
A fresh sheet pulled from the dryer while it is still warm. The first sip of coffee before it has had a chance to cool. Finding that you remembered to charge your phone before it died. Finishing something small — a row of stitches, a clean counter, a message you had been putting off for three days.

The precision matters. 소확행 is not about cultivating a general sense of thankfulness for the big things. It is about noticing the small ones, specifically and by name.

A Word That Arrived at the Right Moment
소확행 did not become popular by accident. It emerged at a particular moment in Korean cultural life — a time when many people, especially younger generations, were feeling the weight of expectation in a very specific way.
South Korea built one of the most remarkable economies of the twentieth century, and it did so at speed. The cultural disposition known as 빨리빨리 — roughly translated as “hurry, hurry,” an orientation toward speed and efficiency that runs through Korean working life — was part of the engine of that growth. It produced results. It also produced exhaustion.
By the 2010s, a generation of young Koreans was coming of age in a society whose demands had not scaled back even as circumstances had become more difficult. Housing was expensive. Competition was intense. The large milestones — stable employment, financial security, the kind of future their parents had described — felt increasingly distant. Into this atmosphere, 소확행 arrived with something that felt almost radical: the suggestion that happiness did not need to wait.

The concept did not tell anyone to stop wanting things, or to abandon ambition, or to pretend the difficulties were not real. It offered something more modest and more immediately useful — the idea that the day in front of you also contains pleasure, if you are willing to look for it.

Why It Resonates Beyond Korea
소확행 is a Korean word, but it describes a feeling that belongs to everyone. Most cultures have developed some version of this idea — the Japanese kodawari, the precise attention to small details done well; the Danish hygge, the deliberate cultivation of warmth and coziness; the Swedish lagom, the satisfaction of just enough. These words have all traveled internationally, not because people needed to borrow a foreign concept but because they recognized in the word something they had always felt and never quite named.
소확행 travels for the same reason. The experience of noticing that a small, ordinary moment is genuinely good — and the desire for a word that honors that — is not uniquely Korean. It is just that Korean happened to find a particularly useful word for it.

What sets 소확행 apart from some of its Western equivalents is the emphasis on reliability. It is not about manufacturing coziness or engineering the perfect evening at home. It is about recognizing pleasures that are already there, that cost nothing to access, and that will be available again tomorrow. There is something almost practical about it — a mental accounting of the good that is already present, before you go looking elsewhere for it.

How to Practice It
The honest answer is that 소확행 does not really require a practice. It requires attention, which is slightly different.
The pleasures it points to do not need to be created. They are already threaded through most ordinary days. The cup of tea that is exactly the right temperature. The particular quality of morning light before the city fully wakes up. The feeling of finishing something that needed doing. The sound of rain against a window when you have nowhere to be.
What 소확행 asks — and the ask is quiet, not demanding — is simply that you notice when these things are happening. That you do not let them pass without at least briefly registering that yes, this is good. This is here. This counts.
In a world that tends to measure happiness in peaks and milestones, there is something quietly subversive about insisting on the value of the everyday. Not every good day needs to be remarkable. Some good days are just warm coffee and a room with enough light and a small piece of work that came out right.

That is enough. More than enough.

소확행 is not a philosophy, not a wellness strategy, not a trend. It is just a word for something most of us have felt and rarely stopped to name.
Small. Certain. Already here.