What is Taste Anyway?

An Introduction to KhaiHasTaste

What is taste anyway? And who's to say who has it?

Honestly, I don't think taste is something that starts. It's not a switch. It's something that's always being built, and I couldn't point to a single moment and call it the moment I developed taste. It's not something a class or a job hands you, the way it hands you a technique, a skill, or tools. A visual art class, a fashion degree, a few years actually making the work, the rooms most people never see - production sets, styling calls, editorial shoots - all of that ran alongside it, adding to it along the way. But none of it built the thing itself. What builds taste is separate: it's the consuming you go looking for on your own, outside anything assigned to you. You can walk out of any art or design school with real skill and no taste at all - or with both, depending on whether you were doing that second thing the whole time. But yet again, who’s to say who has it?

I'm not interested in settling that one. What I do know is what mine has been paying attention to, and for a while now, that's been here - South Africa.

South Africa has been making things the rest of the world hadn't caught up to yet: creations that argued with history and redefined identity - refusing to sit still and be decorative. The people have a lot to say and KhaiHasTaste is building a megaphone.

Not enough people are writing and documenting the South African visual art and design landscape, its past, its present and its possibilities, in a way that feels urgent. Sometimes, it's considered too niche or dismissed as being too abstract.

I started paying attention properly, way beyond scrolling past. I learned an artist's name, then the experiments that led to them finding their voice and style, then the experiences that shaped the stories they believed were worth telling. Pulling one thread brings the whole tapestry of a scene with it.

That's what an informed memory system feels like before it has a name for itself: taste is felt in the body before it's explained in the head. The same word we use for how something feels on your tongue applies to how something feels when your eyes gaze upon it. You know it the way you know salt, or heat, or something going slightly off, before you can say why. You remember taste.

That's the whole premise of this page, really: putting that memory system to work, in public. Not "here's what's good," delivered from above like a verdict. More like, here's what I noticed, here's the story that intrigued me, and here's why I think it'll do something to you too. You are signing up to focus on the people, the story, the creation, what room they came out of, and what they are pushing back against.

An ensemble on a runway in Hyde Park this season links to a painting hanging in a Woodstock gallery, which connects to a photograph taken in the eighties, which ties back to someone's grandmother's church dress. Nothing here happens in isolation. Everything is a reply to something else.

Taste travelled here through centuries of hands, tailors, carpenters, sculptors, painters, archivists, and so much more - landing in this exact moment, each having passed down something so unique that continues to contribute to the greater ecosystem. And KhaiHasTaste is not letting it go unnoticed.

There is no shortage of accounts posting flyers for openings, and we honestly need them. But this space treats South African art and design as a culture with its own bloodlines and breakthroughs - not a feed of pictures without context underneath them - showing why a garment echoes a painting that echoes a photograph of your aunt's random night out with friends at a jazz club in Soweto, from 40 years ago.

That means coverage of what's actually worth your time: the show behind the show, the emerging name before everyone else finds them, the context that makes an opening mean something. It means access to the big institutions alongside the spaces nobody is covering yet - the studios above the taxi rank, the pop-up in someone's flat - because the scene lives everywhere, not just in the buildings with the best lighting.

Every September we put on our traditional wear for one day and call it heritage, without asking how it got there, or who's still making it the way it's always been made. That's the kind of story this space exists to tell: not just what something looks like, but everything standing behind it.

So many untold stories, so many people speaking - and so much culture curation happening underneath all of it. I want us to talk about all of it, one thread at a time.

-Khai