Taiwanese Sensibility: How Korea Fell in Love with Taiwan's Streets

30-Second Overview: "대만감성 (Taiwanese Sensibility)" is what young Koreans call the feeling they get from Taiwan's streets — iron window grilles, covered arcades packed with scooters, faded signage, bougainvillea creeping over old apartment walls. Things Taiwanese people want to tear down, Koreans frame as Asia's most captivating aesthetic. After NewJeans and ILLIT filmed music videos in Taiwan in 2024, the concept went viral. In 2025, Seoul International Book Fair made "Taiwanese Sensibility" its theme, drawing 150,000 visitors. But the Korean word 감성 doesn't mean "aesthetics" — it means "the capacity to be moved." The subject is the visitor, not the place.

Two Thousand Window Grilles

In 2013, Hsin Yung-sheng and Yang Chao-ching set themselves an "impossibly ambitious goal" in Tainan¹ — they wanted to find out how many different iron window grille patterns the city had.

Hsin studied interior design. Yang studied information engineering. Both from Kaohsiung, they'd met in 2011 at a shipping container art festival and noticed their cameras kept drifting toward old buildings. They launched "Old House Face" (老屋顏), a studio dedicated to documenting Taiwan's vanishing architectural details. In their first six months in Tainan alone, they photographed over two thousand distinct patterns — geometric lines, birds, fish, flowers, each one hand-bent by an ironworker to a homeowner's taste.

"Then we realized this was an absolute abyss!" Yang said¹.

These grilles were born between the 1960s and 1980s as practical anti-burglar devices on Taiwanese houses. No two were alike. But as aluminum windows replaced iron ones, old buildings fell to urban renewal, and elderly ironworkers passed away, the craft began to vanish². What haunts Hsin most isn't the demolition itself: "Even if you rescue an iron window grille and move it elsewhere, the connection and context with the original homeowner vanishes."¹

Taiwanese people look at iron grilles and think about whether to install aluminum. Koreans look at them and post them on Instagram with #대만감성.

📝 Curator's Note
The Korean word 감성 (gamsong) doesn't simply mean "sensibility" or "aesthetics." It means the capacity to feel deeply, to be moved. 대만감성 isn't "Taiwan's aesthetic" — it's "being moved by Taiwan." The subject of the emotion is the visitor, not the place being visited.

From One Music Video to a Million Visitors

The phrase "대만감성" began circulating in Korean photography and travel circles around 2019. That year, indie singer-songwriter Car, the garden came to Taiwan to film the music video for "Tree" — nothing but railway tracks, scooters, and corrugated metal houses, the kind of scenery Taiwanese wouldn't look at twice³.

The real explosion came in 2024. In March, HYBE's rookie girl group ILLIT shot concept photos for their debut EP Super Real Me across Taipei — MRT stations, apartment blocks, convenience stores, all making it into the frame⁴. In May, NewJeans released the "How Sweet" MV, and every scene — the circular overpass at Huajiang Housing Complex in Wanhua, tree-lined streets in Minsheng Community, rice paddies and a railroad crossing in Jiaoxi, Yilan — was forensically identified and pilgrimaged by Korean fans⁵.

By year's end, HYUKOH frontman Oh Hyuk and model Hwang Jimin shot their wedding photos in Taipei. The locations included a Huaxi Street ice shop, Banqiao 435 Art Zone, and the Heping Xinsheng pedestrian overpass — a forty-year-old landmark that had appeared in Edward Yang's Yi Yi and Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman. The bridge was demolished in November 2024⁶. Oh Hyuk's photos became its last artistic record.

✦ "The things being loved are the same things being torn down — that's the deepest paradox of Taiwanese Sensibility."

By 2025, Taiwan's Tourism Administration recruited Super Junior's Kyuhyun as its brand ambassador, with the campaign theme "Romance is Around You"⁷. That June, Taiwan became the featured country at the 70th Seoul International Book Fair under the banner of "Taiwanese Sensibility" — 23 Taiwanese creators, 85 publishers, 550 book titles, 63 events, a 360-square-meter pavilion. Total attendance exceeded 150,000, a record⁸.

Your Ordinary Life Is Someone Else's Nostalgia

There's a structural reason Koreans are drawn to Taiwan's streets: their own have been demolished.

From the 1990s onward, South Korea underwent aggressive urban renewal. Old neighborhoods were flattened and replaced with uniform high-rises. Taiwan, with its slower pace of urban redevelopment and different land policies, preserved far more of its 1960s-to-80s streetscape⁹. What Taiwanese call "just daily life," Koreans see as "the landscape we lost."

Korea's recent Newtro (뉴트로, New + Retro) trend has fed into this. But the retro cafés and vintage shops in Seoul are largely manufactured sets. Taiwan's iron grilles and terrazzo floors aren't sets — they're the real thing³. Unintentional nostalgia hits harder than designed nostalgia.

Then there's the pace. Korea's education grind, overtime culture, and intense competition have left younger generations craving slowness. Taiwan's street rhythms — a grandmother brewing tea under an arcade, a cat napping on a scooter seat, a breakfast stall owner unhurriedly flipping an egg pancake — transmit a feeling of "people actually living well"⁹.

Deeper still, Taiwan New Cinema laid the groundwork. Hou Hsiao-hsien's long takes, Edward Yang's urban dissections, Tsai Ming-liang's loneliness — these films have a devoted following among Korean cinephiles. Many Koreans' first mental image of Taiwan came from these movies, and Taiwanese Sensibility's visual language overlaps almost perfectly with those cinematic memories.

📝 Curator's Note
The appeal of Taiwanese Sensibility isn't beauty. It's authenticity. Iron grilles weren't installed to look good. Arcades weren't built to be photographed. Precisely because these things weren't made to be seen, they're profoundly moving when someone finally sees them.

The Pilgrimage Map and Its Shadow

The places that went viral through Taiwanese Sensibility aren't conventional tourist attractions — they're everyday spots with the texture of lived life: the Huajiang Housing Complex in Wanhua (NewJeans MV), Dadaocheng's Baroque-façade Dihua Street, the tree-lined blocks of Minsheng Community, Tainan's Shennong Street, and the Jiaoxi railroad crossing in Yilan.

But when "imperfect daily life" becomes a tourist draw, tensions follow.

In Taipei, neighborhoods like Yongkang Street and Dadaocheng have already been reshaped by tourism. A coffee shop owner in Ximending observed: "You can only find the same types of stores."¹⁰ A French documentary filmmaker working in Taipei put it bluntly: "The new buildings are so expensive that only 7-Eleven and high-end restaurants can afford to rent them. And the new buildings all look the same without traditional Taiwanese features."¹⁰

Dihua Street offers a more hopeful model. Through a Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) mechanism, historic building façades have been preserved without mass displacement¹¹. But this approach doesn't scale to every neighborhood.

The core tension is this: the scenes Korean cameras celebrate are the same ones Taiwan's urban renewal machine wants to demolish. The Heping Xinsheng overpass where Oh Hyuk shot his wedding photos was torn down a month later.

Seeing Yourself Through Foreign Eyes

The Korean craze has forced Taiwanese to look at their own surroundings differently.

Streetscapes once dismissed as "messy," "dilapidated," and "overdue for redevelopment" have been re-valued through foreign lenses. Designer Liao Hsiao-tzu (廖小子) keeps a sober perspective: "Many people say my designs are very 'Taiwan-flavored,' but I absolutely cannot represent Taiwan." He pushes further: "The rush to define 'Taiwan flavor' — isn't it because we fear that if we can't articulate what Taiwan is, then Taiwan is nothing?"¹²

Designer Joe Fang (方序中) echoes the point: "This shouldn't be done by one person alone — I cannot define Taiwan's beauty with a single visual logic."¹²

💡 Did You Know?
Over one million Korean tourists visited Taiwan in 2024, making up 12.77% of all international visitors — the third-largest source country. In January 2025 alone, 118,000 Koreans arrived, a 4% year-on-year increase¹³.

Writer Lu Hung-chin captured it well: "For Taiwanese people, Taiwanese Sensibility is as daily as breathing — DNA fused into the bloodstream."¹⁴ You don't notice your own breathing until someone tells you how good it sounds.

The 2025 Seoul Book Fair curation pushed toward deeper understanding. Its six thematic zones — Literature, Lifestyle, Images, Land & Travel, Food & Entertainment, Historical Sensibility — weren't just showcasing Taiwan's visual charm but unfolding the cultural fabric behind it⁸. Culture Minister Lee Yuan said at the opening that Taiwan's sensibility emerges from a small island's "resilience and inclusivity," absorbing external influences while developing a uniquely distinctive cultural depth¹⁵.

After years of visiting old houses across Taiwan, Yang Chao-ching offered this: "Houses are like vessels — every family brews a different drink, depending on what emotions we pour in."¹

The strangest thing about Taiwanese Sensibility may be this: the street scenes it points to — the iron grilles, the old apartment walls, the bougainvillea — none of them were made to be admired. They simply survived. And things that have survived will, one day, die.

Going through a decade's worth of photographs, Hsin Yung-sheng has noticed that many of the grilles he shot are already gone. Some were torn off. Some went down with the whole building. He says his camera is now racing against the wrecking ball².

The Heping Xinsheng overpass is an empty lot now. But in Oh Hyuk's wedding photos, the bridge is still there.

Further Reading:

• Taiwanese Architecture — From the Japanese colonial era to the present, how Taiwan's architecture grew layer upon layer into what it is today
• Taiwan Cinema — The long takes of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang are the cinematic DNA of Taiwanese Sensibility
• Taiwanese Tea Ceremony and Aesthetic Living — Another dimension of Taiwan's slow-life ethos, seen through the tea table
• Convenience Store Culture — The late-night glowing convenience store is a quintessential Taiwanese Sensibility scene
• Taiwan's Religion and Temple Culture — Temples are the most vivid layer of color and faith in Taiwan's streetscape

References