By Grace Linden

At Park Smile dentistry on Ninth Avenue, dental checkups come with a little levity.

Outside the Inner Sunset office an oversized balloon caricature greets visitors and pedestrians alike, serving as something between a mascot and an inflatable doorman. Apart from a pandemic-mandated hiatus, Brian Asman, of Balloons Equal Fun, has delivered a new sculpture to Park Smile roughly every two weeks for the past 12 years.

Asman first met Susannah Wise and Scott Lebus, Park Smile’s office manager and orthodontic specialist respectively, more than two decades ago. After seeing Asman at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market – he was making, Wise recalled, the most “unusual and elaborate balloon sculptures” – the couple hired him to create caricatures at their wedding. For the launch of Park Smile, Asman made a grinning child and parent each holding a toothbrush in their outstretched arms. After the opening party, passersby asked about the pair, which encouraged Park Smile to continue to work with Asman.

Asman first moved to the Bay Area in 1997 to work as a chef. His career shift came after reading a book on ballooning, and he spent hours teaching himself to manipulate balloons. Nowadays, he will try his hand at almost any design, except for copyrighted material, which he finds uninteresting and lacking a collaborative element.

“My favorite thing,” he said, “is to make something I’ve never made before,” whether that is an imaginary animal or haunted house. Asman’s dream installation is likewise ambitious: He hopes to create an anatomically correct rendering of the human body that visitors can walk through and explore.

Given their scale and intricacy, many of Asman’s designs are meticulously preplanned. What was previously done in pencil is now completed on a computer. He can spend years mulling over an idea. It was only this year that he worked out how to make a mummy’s wrappings appear to unravel, a request that had come from Wise and Lebus’s daughter.

After completing a sculpture for Park Smile, Asman transports it to the office via Muni and BART. Understandably, his work attracts a second, or even third, glance.

Asman himself comes off exactly like someone who would work with balloons. He is jovial, quick to laugh, and, when asked to confirm his age, said, “I’m not sure of my age. I haven’t thrown myself a birthday party since I started celebrating so many others.”

Once arriving at its destination, the balloon figure is slotted into a custom-built baseplate outfitted with a pole. Rarely adhesives or wire framework are used. He eschews helium and inflates each balloon with air, sometimes orally, sometimes with a pump. A project for Park Smile can take anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours to execute. His hope, Asman said, “is to use balloons in ways they weren’t meant to be used.”

Despite supply chain issues that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, the balloon industry has exploded (figuratively) in recent years. The expansive range of shapes, sizes, and opacities now available means the sky really is the limit when it comes to design. Celebrities, including the many Kardashians, Ciara and Cardi B, have all hosted outlandish balloon-filled parties whose bright, flashy colors are Instagram-fodder. Yet, with the fanfare comes an environmental concern, and although Asman uses biodegradable balloons made from the sap of the latex tree, they are slow to break down.

The balloon industry is more global than when Asman first started out. His favored balloons come from Vietnam and installations regularly take him around the world. The community is similarly dispersed, a far cry from his initial forays in the late-1990s when everybody was more geographically disconnected. That the network is much more intertwined is thanks to the internet as well as the many conventions which bring balloon artists together.

Even as he continues to travel internationally, Park Smile will remain his longest standing client. As Asman and Wise agreed, this is a textbook case of small, local businesses supporting each other.