Commonwealth and Council, which is presenting a concurrent show at their Koreatown space of work by the Korean artist Suki Seokyeong Kang, featured works by Young Joon Kwak and Oren Pinhassi and attracted the attention of curators and collectors alike.
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Young Joon Kwak and Oren Pinhassi at Commonwealth and Council.
Commonwealth and Council present the sixth installment of G.L.O.W. (Gaze Living Other Worlds) pairing artists to start a conversation in homage to the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Young Joon Kwak and Oren Pinhassi propose new sites of queer embodiment, using spaces and objects present in our daily routines. A personal favourite is the above work by Young Joon Kwak which explores the concept of taking up space. As always, this gallery is killing it.
L.A.’s Commonwealth and Council brought in the tag team of sculptors Young Joon Kwak and Oren Pinhassi Oren Pinhassi Follow for the sixth iteration of its tribute to the women’s wrestling league Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (now the subject of a popular Netflix series). The featured works, which the artists selected in consultation with one another, center bodies of all sizes and sorts. In Pinhassi’s work, this can be quite irreverent, like a sculptural walker outfitted with an awning and a glory hole. Kwak takes a more direct approach, such as a work featuring a nude female torso seated on a Herman Miller chair, or a riff on Constantin Brancusi featuring spiky protrusions cast from the insides of fleshlights. “Oren’s work is about sites where private activities come out in public,” said gallery director Irina Gusin, “while Young Joon is reacting to these narratives from art history that use women’s bodies as passive vessels.”
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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.
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November 11 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Young Joon Kwak
Artist Talk
MECA, Osher Hall, Second floor
Free and open to the public
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Issue #147, Spring 2019
“Whether in sculpture, music, video, or the collaborative Mutant Salon that she founded, Young is working with the precision of a ninja and the heart of a shaman to wear away limiting beliefs, so we can imagine new bodies, new selves.”
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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.”
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“The vast majority of people don’t give a fuck about art.”
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Gallery Chat with Young Joon Kwak at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (SF)
Friday, Mar 8, 2019 | 12:30–1pm
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Young Joon Kwak, founder of Mutant Salon, a traveling beauty platform for queer, trans, femme, POC artists and performers, riffs on the Greek deity Hermaphroditus, the embodiment of fluid sex and gender. Kwak's sculpture "Hermaphroditus's Reveal I" (2017), a wave-like arc of fiberglass cloth and resin coated in gold enamel, relates to Cahun's masks and intentional enigma. Installed on the floor, the metallic surface appears to harbor an unseen figure on its hands and knees; a pair of hands edges beyond the curtain, and fingers from a third tease a back flap, hinting the veil is about to be lifted and the truth exposed.
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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.”
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