Bay Area Reporter: Gender fluidity & mutable identity
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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ArtNews 15 Los Angeles Artists to Watch
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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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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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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