Young Joon Kwak: RESISTERHOOD

Young Joon Kwak's work begins with touch. Molds and imprints of bodies - the artist's own, and those of friends, loved ones, and collaborators - are dis- and re-assembled, burnished and jeweled. The resulting works bear intimate human traces and yet remain anonymous, moving in and out of recognition. They shimmer in their distortions and imperfections, presenting us with bodies both frozen in time and in perpetual transition: in the midst of youth, aging, gestation, or gender transformation.

RESISTERHOOD includes new commissions and works made over the past ten years, a series of neon sculptures for the Museum's public window gallery, and a soundscape composed by Xina Xurner (Kwak and Marvin Astorga) with Johanna Hedva, Anna Luisa, and Dorian Wood. Taken together, these artworks are a mobilizing call for a new politics of queer and trans resistance: embracing a playful erotics, and celebrating imperfection, abjection, ambiguity, and uncategorizable ways of looking and being. 

Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984, Queens, New York; lives and works in Los Angeles) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, an MA from the University of Chicago in 2010, and an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014. They are the founder of Mutant Salon, a queer-transfem-BIPOC collective beauty salon and collaborative art and performance platform. They are also the lead performer of the drag-electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. Their work has been widely exhibited at galleries and museums internationally, including at the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living. Their solo exhibition, Resistance Pleasure, was recently on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2024). Kwak is a recipient of the Trellis Art Fund grant (2024); Artadia Los Angeles Award (2024), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2022), Korean Arts Foundation of America Award (2020), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), Artist Community Engagement Grant (2016), and Art Matters Foundation Grant (2016). Their work is in the collections of Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Dallas Museum of Art; MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville.

Curated by Stamatina Gregory, Head Curator / Director of Exhibitions and Collections