Young Joon Kwak (they/she) is a sculptor and performance artist whose work challenges the boundaries of representation through innovative techniques of masking and camouflage. Their art generates new, tangible 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 are the founder of Mutant Salon, a dynamic queer-transfem-BIPOC collective beauty salon and collaborative art and performance platform. They also electrify audiences as 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 next solo exhibition Resistance Pleasure opens at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in August 2024, with another major exhibition following at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York in 2025.
Sponsored by the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series (WVALS), Department of Art Practice
