Steven Junil Park: The Vessel

Enter a world where the boundaries between art, costume, performance and poetry dissolve—where a garment might be a sculpture, a vessel of memory, or choreography waiting to happen. In the dream-like practice of Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist and designer Steven Junil Park 박준일, categories don’t sit neatly apart. They blur, entangle, and collapse into something stranger, more powerful, more alive. Each stitch, a spell for communion with the intangible.

Spanning years of collaboration with dancers, musicians, poets, choreographers and designers—including Aldous Harding, Josie Archer and Kosta Bogoievski, Jo Randerson, Jahra Wasasala, Xin Ju, Juanita Hepi, Sung Hwan Park, Sam Low and Nathan Joe—this exhibition gathers sculptural garments made for music videos, stage works, poetry readings, underground raves, art installations, and Park’s own radically amorphous design label, 6x4. These are not costumes as endpoints, but artefacts of creative kinship—traces of shared gestures, relationships, rituals.

The gallery becomes a kind of theatrical cosmos: moody, luminous, and otherworldly. A stage set for ideas too fluid to be pinned down. Garments hang suspended like spirits or spells. Others settle into corners with a quiet kind of power. Video, sound, scent and movement breathe life back into them—each piece pulsing with energy beyond its materiality.

But this is not a fashion exhibition. Nor is it theatre design. Park’s work resists such labels. His practice reflects a belief in the eternal blooming/boundlessness of ungovernable creativity—a creative ecology that refuses silos and hierarchies. Here, culture is not a tangible object but a living network of relationships. Not a product, but a thread that moves through time—between ancestors and descendants, artists and audiences, performers and poets.

This is a world where garments are vessels for memory, resistance, and renewal. A world in which handwork and intuition guide the way. A world where making is connection. Where the artist is not just a maker, but an oracle of intangible realms—a guide into spaces we cannot name, but can feel deep in our bones.

^{Steven Junil Park, Han, 2022.}