Sung Hwan Bobby Park

INFO

Name	Sung Hwan Bobby Park (he/him)
Also known as	박성환, Sung Hwan Park
Born	1989
Country of Birth	South Korea
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Korean
Artform	Visual arts, Theatre, Craft/Object, Performance art
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Sung Hwan ‘Bobby’ Park is a Korean visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Park’s multidisciplinary practice explores personal experiences of queer identity using ceramics, poetry, performance, embroidery and digital drawing. In 2023, as well as being the recipient of the Arts Foundation Springboard award, Park was runner-up in the Waikato Contemporary Art Awards and a finalist in the Portage Ceramic Awards.

Park moved from 청주시 Cheongju, South Korea to Aotearoa in 2000 with his mother and two younger siblings and, in order to retain his Korean citizenship, returned to complete compulsory military service in 2012. His artistic practice has explored and expressed the many facets of this traumatic and transformative experience. On his return to Aotearoa, he trained as an industrial designer at Auckland University of Technology – a compromise between parental expectation for financial stability and his wish to be an artist. He began taking pottery classes at Auckland Studio Potters (where he now tutors) during the last year of his tertiary studies in 2016, which he has described as crucial to the development of his artistic voice.

Known for his ongoing series of ceramic ‘bullet-proof helmets’, BTM (or 방탄모 bangtanmo in Korean), Park first developed the project whilst undertaking an artist residency at the 85 Glasgow Street Art Centre in Whanganui in 2018. In the same year, he was a finalist in the Emerging Practitioner in Clay Awards, at the Quartz Museum, Whanganui.

During this time in Whanganui, Park came across Pacific Helmets, a local manufacturing company, and began using the helmet form as a way to reclaim his queer identity after his experiences in the South Korean military. While its utility is immediately recognisable, the helmet’s function as protective wear is rejected. As Park says: “My bulletproof helmet was essentially as fragile as these ceramic ones.”

When Park found out that the Korean military set up fake profiles on dating apps to hunt out any gay military personnel, he was not only horrified and angry but acutely aware of his vulnerability at having escaped homophobic persecution. Park explains that:

Conscripts who are proven to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender can be dishonourably discharged and prevented from pursuing other life goals. [...] My project is a response to that and it is about peoples' need to maintain their individuality within a system.

Both a reference to K-pop band BTS and the queer label ‘bottom’, Park’s BTM series has included exhibitions, performance and installation. For the 2023 Auckland Pride festival, BTM Live had Park performing the sexual practice of fisting with clay, wearing leather gear. The remnants of the performance were exhibited at the Audio Foundation as BTM Exhibition, the aftermath of BTM Live. On the performance, Park says: “Our identity is sexual, and we have different sex. I want us to say our sex is beautiful, like works of art. See our sex as beautiful as making art. Let us self-identify and define ourselves. That is powerful. That is sexy.”

BTM 92-6 (2023) at RM Gallery was the third solo exhibition of the series and included drawings, writing, and the performance of Park’s BTM manifesto at the opening of the exhibition.