HongSeok Goh can’t see. But he can make the invisible visible. “To me, air is like a building material,” he says. Goh captures air, bends it, folds it, shapes it, contorts it and gives it colour and heft. As a blind artist, he says, balloons are a perfect medium for him — a medium that turns mere air into something everyone can see.

Recently, this remarkable balloon artist from South Korea opened his first-ever installation in the United States. It’s an elephant and a turtle, in a kaleidoscope of colours, at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum.

“He creates visual works of wonder, through his own imagination and his inner eye, for the rest of us to see,” said Rebecca Hoffberger, director of the museum.”

Goh built the elephant and turtle sculpture, which is more than 20 feet long, with a team of six balloon artists who came with him from South Korea and two American balloon artists. During the construction, Goh slept just two to three hours a night. “I see this as a responsibility and a mission I’ve been tasked with. That’s really what’s driving me. In my mind, I can always sleep later,” he said.

The mission that drives him so fiercely is manifold: He’s representing Korea, since his trip to the US is funded by a grant from the South Korean government; he’s representing artists with disabilities; and — perhaps the role he feels most passionate about — he’s representing balloons as an art form.

“My hope is that this will be the start of a balloon art revolution,” he said, through a translator.

In Asia, he makes his living by building whimsical balloon decorations for shopping malls, corporate events, parties and the like; his incredibly precise and intricate latex-and-air creations would never be considered worthy of an art museum. When he got the grant to travel abroad and started looking for a museum to house an inflatable installation in the US, he found much the same attitude here.

Then his plea for a space made it to the desk of Hoffberger at the American Visionary Art Museum. At this unusual museum, balloons fit the bill. Every artist at this museum must be self-taught, as Goh is; many of them also create despite disabilities, and use unusual materials. Hoffberger didn’t see balloons as too temporary for a gallery; in fact, she thought of balloons as having great longevity compared to bubbles — because yes, she knows a bubble artist.

Hoffberger offered Goh a barn with plenty of space to house his installation, and even found a friend with a nearby townhouse who could host the seven Korean balloon twisters. She brought over blankets and extra toilet paper herself. She was thrilled to watch the skilled balloon artists at work, as they started twisting pieces of the project from almost the moment they first arrived.

“It’s the same kind of love we can put into a meal or a garden,” she said. “The pyramids are wonderful, right? But at the same time, there’s another kind of artistry — it’s all about process and intention versus just product.”

That all being said, Goh and his team did go to great lengths to make this sculpture last as long as possible. It’s meant to be on display at the museum for at least 30 days — an extremely long time for a balloon sculpture.

To make that possible, they double-stuffed every single balloon, a time-intensive process of putting one balloon inside another one over and over, even the very thinnest. They also filled each balloon with Hi-Float, a liquid sealant that makes for quite a mess if a balloon does pop during the handling. Before the opening of the show, they climbed on a ladder to spray every little facet with another chemical to help it keep its shine.

Addi Somekh, a Los Angeles-based balloon twister who once starred in a cable TV reality show about balloons and who worked on this project, marvelled at the level of difficulty of Goh’s designs. “I’ve been twisting for 26 years, and he had to teach it to me,” he said. “There’s a level of integrity in his work that’s mind-numbing.”

The artist came up with the concept of the two animals to represent the cosmos — the vast elephant for space, the methodically plodding turtle for time. Every shape and colour was chosen for its allegorical value — the elephants’ four legs in the colours of the Korean flag, surrounding the turtle with stars on its head for the US; the huge ears meant to evoke black holes, on either side of the unfurling dragon that serves as the elephant’s trunk and also as a symbol of the expanding universe.

Goh started losing his sight as a teenager due to a virus that attacks the optical nerve, he said. He is now 45 and has very little vision; he expects to go completely blind in a matter of years. In his 20s, he started looking for a creative way to support himself despite his vision loss, and he hit on balloon twisting.

Along the way, he has developed a global reputation and has even invented balloon techniques that artists thousands of miles away now incorporate in their work.

The balloon show was displayed at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore from December 11, 2017 to January 31, 2018

By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 4th, 2018