Glitter Mani Fest
Young Joon Kwak
Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
May 30 – July 18, 2026
Opening reception: May 30, 3–5 PM
Closing / tape release: details forthcoming

VISIT THE EXHIBITION

PRESS RELEASE

Commonwealth and Council presents Glitter Mani Fest by Young Joon Kwak. Spanning sculpture, painting, and the mixed-media artist book/zine Glitter Mani Festo (2026), the exhibition continues Kwak’s queering interrogation of dominant modes of representation of bodies in society and art history. The following text by Jennifer Doyle attends to the social, material, and sensory dimensions of the works on view.

Young Joon Kwak's sculptures are social, produced in collaboration with her circle, and designed to invite us in. 

One needs the full range of the word circle to describe the sociality of these forms: the nouns (a circle as in a ring, a realm, a group, a halo) and the verbs (to circle and encircle as in to move around and orbit, or to wrap around and enclose).

These works are generated through the artist’s use of invert-casting: as she explains, rather than “building up a body as a solid form,” Kwak “works with the negative space” created as bodies are “pressed and held” in the generation of the mold.¹ These sculptures record the fold of an embrace, the reach of an extension, the twists of entanglement. Their bodies are fragmented and open; we can explore them from what feels like the inside. 

Each casting is the record of a studio-based or public performance. Artist Jay Carlon, whose body informs To Refuse Turning Away From Our Transitioning Bodies (Jay, Holding) and Divine Dive (Jay), held their pose in the artist’s studio for two hours—a painfully long period of time. During this session, Carlon, whose practice is rooted in movement, used a mantra in order to sustain themselves: “I am strong, I am powerful, I am beautiful, I am divine.” Everyone working on the sculpture chimed in, repeating the mantra as the material set around Carlon’s outstretched arms, legs, grasping hands, and pointed toes. 

Femmmes (Nic, Toria, Yara) begins as what the artist describes as a “performance gone wrong.” The event of this work’s casting was part of FeMMMES, a June 2024 art happening organized by LA Freewaves and staged outdoors, at the Los Angeles State Historical Park, around the corner from the Women’s Building on the edge of downtown. Three trans/nonbinary femmes, former students, mentees and friends of the artist’s, participated in this difficult casting. The material didn’t set; Nic Brannen, Yara Colón, and Toria Kahni Shi had to be cut free. I witnessed this myself: it was not easy—each movement had implications for the others caught in this embrace. Instead of turning away from the performance’s remnants, Kwak reconstructed the form, tending to its breaks and ruptures without hiding its scars. The exterior of this work, which faces the wall and is barely accessible to the visitor, is covered with over 10,000 rhinestones. The “inside” of other works, open for us to explore, shows us the skin of their subjects—pores, wrinkles, folds are all there for us to see.

The embrace of Sungjae Lee and Kwak recorded by Curing, Shimmering, Together (SJ and Young) references a July 2025 performance and protest. Led by Young Sun Han, Lee and Kwak held an embrace, their faces covered with liquid glitter silicone, as they walked in a procession from the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art to the Stonewall National Monument at Christopher Park. When they arrived, they sat on a bench, holding the pose and each other, functioning as a living counter-monument to the memorialization of the Stonewall rebellion, whose history has been subject to many layers of whitewashing.

As you explore the sharply contrasting sides of these works you may notice that your sense of the internal and external flip around each other, as does the relationship between figure and ground, and that you can get lost.

These works are all surface in the way we are all all surface, inside and out. "Every living thing," writes the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, "every organ and cell, has a skin or a shell, tunica, wrapping, carapace, membrane, meninx, armor, pellicle, septum or pleura."² The skin-like structure which holds the brain, the innermost layer of the membranes which protect this organ, is called the pia mater — Latin, for tender mother. The mother is everything outside the body that gives the body its shape; it is the body that holds the body. (The "mother mold" is the hard shell which holds a pliant silicone mold—supporting the latter's form.)

Young Joon Kwak invites us to think about multi-dimensional boundaries—not hard lines, but the glittering shells, moving surfaces, boundaries that do not define so much as they envelop and constitute and also radiate, like shards of light refracted off the surface of a lake. Our attraction to the shimmer of that light is primal, instinctual: as she writes in Glitter Mani Festo, where we see that movement and play of light, there the promise of water and the promise of life. 

In utero, the skin develops before any other sensory system. It is fundamental to being. Other sensory systems depend on it. We only know the world through these surfaces—we take in light and sound, taste and touch, feel pressure and heat through our skins. Thus the harmony between sensing and manifesting: something is made manifest when it can be perceived and sensed. When it is all over your face. 

— Jennifer Doyle

¹Artist’s statement
²Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego: A New Translation by Naomi Siegel (Routledge, 2016), p. 14.  

Young Joon Kwak would like to thank Nic Brannen, Jay Carlon, Yara Colón, Sungjae Lee, and Toria Kahni Shi, whose trust, friendship, and collaboration are integral to the works in the exhibition; Sophia Beall, Danica Ribi, Charlie Roses, Masha Sheinina, Ian Smith, and Toria Kahni Shi for studio assistance; and Jacky Perez, Boh Studios, and Press Friends for fabrication and production support.

BUY ZINE

WALKTHROUGH

Captioned walkthrough coming soon.

IMAGES

Installation images coming soon.

LISTEN

Soft Revolt Jamz (Glittered) — a collaborative audio work by Marvin Astorga and Young Joon Kwak, featuring Johanna Hedva, Anna Luisa, Dorian Wood, and Xina Xurner — will be released during the exhibition.

EVENTS

Opening reception: May 30, 3–5 PM
Commonwealth and Council

Closing/Tape Release: details forthcoming