“In All About Love (2000), the book that gives the exhibition its title, bell hooks wrote: ‘Love as a process that has been refined, alchemically altered as it moves from state to state, is that “perfect love” that can cast out fear.’ The artists’ efforts to heal the wounds wrought by society on marginalized people are, ultimately, a form of hook’s perfect love.”
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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, 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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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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“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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“…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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“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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“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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