Canadian Art: Review of The Cave
NOVEMBER 2018
“This was a celebration of a fierce partnership aglow and it was one of the most tender things that I had ever seen”
—Erik Benjamins
“Find a cave and push it inside out. Cast its ends and its beginnings, its never-ending beginnings, in mercurial metals that move upward. Does it even have an inside anymore? In the gallery, a mirrored fountain points to those eyes that surveil you and bodies like yours; in the film you blur their faces.”
—Ginger Carlson
& reviews by Andrew Berardini, Tao Fei , Maeve Hanna, Catherine de Montreuil, Ryley O'Byrne and Daniella Sanader
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Akimbo - Young Joon Kwak at the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff)
“It unambiguously represents the masculine and feminine, slipping along surfaces and into tiny beautiful crevices across the exhibition space. Like the snail, THE CAVEslides through the viewer’s imagination, instilling a stance of perfect harmony for a non-patriarchal position within the gallery space.”
—MAEVE HANNA
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Artforum Critic's Pick: Young Joon Kwak and Mutant Salon at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)
“…These objects cue the themes of Young Joon Kwak’s sculptures: sexual figuration and transformation. For example, Hermaphroditus’s Reveal III (all works cited, 2018), which smartly melds abstraction and realism, renders the body as a sheet of resin bending gracefully under its own weight. Nearby, Surveillance Mirror Vaginis reflects the other sculptures in the room in its vaginal yet convex mirrored surface…
…The lesson is queer: everywhere, becoming…”
-Andy Campbell
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CAVERNOUS programming Summer 2018 at LACE
7/20 Oral Histories of Queer Resistance
8/11 Black TED
8/26 Closing Reception
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Frieze Critic's Guide: The Best of the Gallery-Share Shows On Now in New York
“Of particular note is Young Joon Kwak’s metallically sheened sculpture created from casting male sex toys – so many impressions of vaginas form the surface – but the resulting formation is neither yonic nor libidinal, rather a captivating exegesis of the troubling weight we assign to genitalia.”
-Tausif Noor
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"Mutant Salon: Exorcises" screening at Art Basel Hong Kong Film Program
Hong Kong Arts Centre, Wan Chai
Art Basel | Film | Short film program
Thu 29 Mar
4pm - 6pm
Hong Kong Arts Centre
2 Harbour Road
Wan Chai
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Artforum Critic's Pick: “All Hands on Deck” at Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design - Artforum International
“Young Joon Kwak has titled Hermaphroditus’s Reveal I, 2017, after the mythological child of Aphrodite and Hermes, often portrayed in Greco-Roman sculpture as a feminine figure with male genitalia. Through its coyly placed hands and arabesque ripples of resin-coated fiberglass cloth, the work conjures an abstraction of the act of revealing.”
-Jeanne Dreskin
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