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Young Joon Kwak creates sculptures, performances, and videos for display in a gallery setting, in addition to performing with their dance/noise band Xina Xurner, which they founded in Chicago in 2011 for the “queer/femme weirdos and noise freaks” outside of commercial art galleries. At Xina Xurner shows, after moving to Los Angeles, Kwak found a community of amazing queer, trans, people of color, womxn, and mutant artists and performers who inspired them to start Mutant Salon, a platform for collaborative performances and installations through which Kwak collaborates with their community to collectively imagine new futures that celebrate their survival, resistance, healing, and transformation.

Young Joon Kwak is a 34-year-old artist living in Los Angeles who works primarily across sculpture, performance, and video to rethink bodies and space. Aiming to transform the perception of queer, trans, marginalized bodies by reimagining their form, functionality, and materiality, Kwak is interested in the, “unique potential for the hybrid language that's formed between these mediums to counteract the dehumanizing effects of the objectification, policing, and misrepresentation of othered bodies endemic to this world.” Moreover, the artist is the founder of Mutant Salon, a beauty platform for experimental performance collaborations with their QTPOC artists and performers while they are also is lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. The artist recognizes that it’s impossible to represent all queer identities in such an exhibition, saying that “queerness can never be fully contained, it is always on the horizon, the not-yet here and now, the unknown.”

In work that takes the form of sculpture, performance, and video—and is often made in collaboration with other artists—Young Joon Kwak is concerned with imagining different ways of conceiving human bodies and the spaces they occupy “through manipulations in form, functionality, and materiality.” After moving to L.A. in 2012, Kwak founded Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon/performance platform conceived to bring together queer and trans communities, people of color, and women in anti-institutional ways similar to underground shows frequented by the artist’s noise band Xina Xurner (with Marvin Astorga).

“If artists are meant to produce new forms of beauty, I would align myself with a sort of mutant beauty,” said Kwak, whose interests include considering “traditional patriarchal standards of beauty in relation to the history of white supremacy, imperialism, and current social justice issues.”