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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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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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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