ABOUT

Young Joon Kwak (they/she) is a Los Angeles-based sculptor and performance artist whose work challenges the boundaries of representation through inventive techniques of masking and camouflage. Their art generates new and embodied forms of connection and interaction with others that go beyond traditional categories of gender and race, while vividly imagining new spaces for marginalized bodies to thrive.

They electrify audiences as the lead performer of the drag-electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. They also founded Mutant Salon, a dynamic collective beauty salon and nexus for queer-trans-fem-POC artistic collaboration. Solo and collaborative exhibition venues include Arko Art Center, Seoul; Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre, Alberta. Group exhibition and performance venues include Hauser & Wirth, New York; Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Art Museum of the National University of Colombia, Bogotá; and the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.

Kwak is the recipient of the Artadia Award (2024), UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2024), California Community Foundation’s Fellowship for Visual Artists (2022), Korea Arts Foundation of America’s Artist Award (2020), Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant (2018), and the Art Matters Grant (2016). Kwak’s work has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, LA Times, ArtNews, Texte Zur Kunst, and extensively in numerous books, journals, and publications.

Their next solo exhibition Resistance Pleasure opens at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in August 2024, with another solo exhibition following at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York in 2025.

Kwak serves on the boards of the Feminist Center for Creative Work, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. They are represented by Commonwealth And Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

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