A billboard-scale portrait fills the gallery’s front window space: the work depicts artist 박성환 Sung Hwan Bobby Park, wearing a 방탄모 bangtanmo, a ceramic military helmet secured with a satin ribbon. Bathed in hot golden projected light, the artist is both subject and agent of this photographic image, claiming the space in front of the camera, and in front of passersby, as a site of self-sovereignty and intention. In the work’s installation at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, the background colour exceeds the edges of the photographic image to include the adjacent wall and gallery’s main entranceway in its entirety. The viewer is first visually met with the resonant colour surrounding the image, and then immersed in it on entering the space.

Sung Hwan works primarily in ceramics, and with reference to his experiences as a queer person undergoing military service as a marine in South Korea between 2012-2014, and subsequent research related to the military. The 'BTM' series, within which the ceramic helmet is centred, exists as an explicit assertion of queer subjectivity. In the artist’s words, this is a statement of queer magnificence, standing in direct response to the harm caused to Park and his peers forced to hide their identities by the armed forces. Specifically, in 2017, Sung Hwan learned that the Korean military had for a period created fake dating profiles as means to entrap soldiers who were queer, with those caught being investigated and outed to their units.

BTM 아 Ahhh, 2023, which sits within an ongoing series of stills of the helmets as worn by the artist, features a helmet with a gaping mouth and teeth adorned with pearls suspended on silver chains. The protruding tongue is pierced with a silver rod; green hair-extensions tassel or fall as braids from the crown of the gloss-glazed helmet with BTM insignia, and a useable candle holder. The artist wears a necklace of PrEP pills, HIV prevention medication, and a side-eyed look that is shaded by the helmet’s low brim. The figure is counterturned, subtly echoing homoerotic masculine representations within western classical history.

Since 2018 the helmet has had a presence in Sung Hwan’s practice, with individual works accumulating to become a formal language in which the body – the body of clay, the human body – is foregrounded as protagonist. In this sense the work might be considered as form of queer self-portrait, commissioned by the ceramicist-artist Sung Hwan, who works in collaboration with professional photographer Josh Harvey to achieve the image. Another work made in collaboration, BTM 조상초상화 Ancestor Portrait, 2023, alludes to Bunmu, official portraits of loyal military men in the Joseon era (late 14th to early 20th century). In this work Sung Hwan wears a custom 단령 danryung jacket, made by collaborator Steven Junil Park, with 흉배 hyungbae or embroidered square depicting a flying unicorn distributing PrEP pills. Both BTM 조상초상화 Ancestor Portrait and BTM 아 Ahhh synthesise recognisable art-historical tropes with styling choices and narratives specific to this artist and his contemporary context.

We might read these portraits as an implicit queering of the dynamic art critic John Berger suggests is definitive of historical portraiture in the Western tradition: “On the one hand there is the individualism of the artist the thinker, the patron, the owner: on the other hand, the person who is the object of their activities – the woman – treated as a thing or an abstraction” (Ways of Seeing, 1972) Sung Hwan's ‘self-portrait’ might in fact be read is a hybrid form within which subject-object relations are fluid, and self-perception is validated. The viewer is not assumed to be a heterosexual male; the viewed is not assumed to be in state of submission to the vison of the photographer. New formal and political relationships become apparent: between forms of bodily adornment and self-protection, between same-sex desire and its multiple art historical lineages, between representations of queer joy and other modes of insubordination.

박성환 Sung Hwan Bobby Park was born in 청주시 Cheongju, South Korea, and moved to Aotearoa in 2000. He is based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Since completing study in product design at Auckland University of Technology in 2016, Sung Hwan’s practice has expanded to include ceramic sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, and photography. In 2023 he was a recipient of a Springboard award from the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi. Recent exhibitions include BTM: Assembly at Objectspace, BTM: Season at Season, and Aotearoa Contemporary at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (all Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2024). Sung Hwan is currently artist-in-residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles.