Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984 in Queens, NY) is a LA-based multi-disciplinary artist. Kwak’s sculptures reimagine the function, material, and form of objects in order to create spaces and scenarios that propose different ways of viewing and interpreting bodies as mutable and open-ended. Kwak is the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon/platform for experimental performance collaborations with her community of queer, trans, femme, POC artists and performers, and the lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. Performances and exhibitions include: the Hammer Museum, The Broad, REDCAT, and ONE National LGBT Archives, Los Angeles; Regina Rex and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; and Pavillon Vendôme Centre d’Art Contemporain, Clichy, France. Kwak was recently awarded the Art Matters Grant and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Artist Community Engagement Grant. She received an MFA from the University of Southern California (2014), MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago (2010), and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007).
