Dilectio — YOUNG JOON KWAK

Dilectio

Art + Tech Artist-in-Residence Exhibition

Cerritos College Art Gallery

February 10, 2020 – March 13, 2020

Created using the specific equipment and processes available at the Cerritos College Plastics and Composites facilities, combined with their own unique artistic practice, Kwak’s work in Dilectio explores the parallel contemporary paranoias of plastic as a dangerous industrial material and plasticity as a mode of being. In this new series of “plasticized bodies” queerness is rethought through the material realm of composited bodies, blurring the lines between the organic and the inorganic, ultimately reflecting how bodies are always already composites of other organisms, multiple forms of matter, and other unseen forces.

As Kwak explained in their initial residency proposal: “At a time marked by increasing anxieties regarding the effects of plastics, toxicity, and rapid climate change on both cultural and biological processes of evolution, plastics can also produce new ways of rethinking the potential of body plasticity and improvised identity that is the lived experience of many transgender people (including myself).” At the core of such a project is a uniquely speculative proposal: “instead of the fantasy of barricading ourselves from plastics, what creative possibilities can plastics offer us in thinking of new forms of survival, empathy, and understanding of different bodies, and imagining new futures?” The title of the exhibition, Dilectio, is the Latin equivalent for concepts such as delight, pleasure, and love, as well as the linguistic root for modern English words like dildo. Following Paul Preciado’s rethinking of dildos in his book Counter-Sexual Manifesto, Kwak understands the dildo not merely as a replica of living sexual members, but as plasticized tools or bodies that may inform a reimaged conception of new kinds of bodies, new forms of life, and new futures. Kwak takes a composite approach to pushing at the limits of bodily plasticity and the mutability of identity in order to question the relationship between common essentialized misconceptions of human bodies and personhood comprising familiar identity categories such as sex and gender.

Numerous pieces in the exhibition were produced by manipulating and inverting forms derived from diverse origins in contemporary consumer culture (such as silicone sex toys that are ostensibly replicas of human vaginas) and art historical references (such as Constantin Brâncuși’s famous sculptures of essentialized female bodies). In doing so, the works consciously trace (and offer a dissenting alternative to) a sculptural lineage which has traditionally viewed women and their bodies as mere objects. Kwak’s “plasticized bodies” instead imagine agency arising from the ruins of a failed culture, hyper-commercialized male sexual desire, and hostile politics, proposing that the byproducts of capitalism are open to critical intervention; that they can be wielded as a weapon and their functionality can be redirected to multiple dildo-logical and ontological states. A yonic/dildonic convex relationship mirrors and affirms a queer/trans orientation, reflecting the myriad colors and forms of queer bodies in contemporary spaces and, ideally, negating the perpetual threat of surveillance on marginalized bodies (such as the surveillance of transgender peoples’ genitals in order to use the public bathroom of their gender-identities). In addition, a number of these pieces materially combine resin with other non-industrial compounds (such as dirt, rocks, and metals), taking inspiration from the recent geological phenomenon known as ‘plastiglomerate,’ where plastic elements adhered to rock outcroppings, emblematic of an era when it is technically impossible to disentangle the “natural” from other sociopolitical and economic formations.

All photos by Paul Salveson