Visiting Artist Lecture: Young Joon Kwok

Image Credit: Young Joon Kwok, Shining Palimpsest, detail

This lecture is presented as part of the Spring 2021 Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Please email art.design@mgsa.rutgers.edu for zoom link.

Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984 in Queens, NY) is an LA-based multi-disciplinary artist who primarily uses sculpture, performance, video, and community-based collaborations to reimagine bodies and the power structures that govern our everyday lives as mutable and permeable sites of agency. Kwak is the lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner, and the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving platform for collaborative installations and performances with their queer/trans/POC/mutant community. Kwak presented solo and collaborative exhibitions and performances internationally at galleries and institutions including Commonwealth & Council, LA (2017, 2016, 2014), Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada (2018), the Art Museum of the National University of Colombia, Bogotá (2018), The Broad, LA (2016), and the Hammer Museum, LA (2016). Selected group exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2020), Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2019), Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018), and Le Pavillon Vendôme Centre d’Art Contemporain, Clichy, France (2015). Kwak received the Korea Arts Foundation of America’s Award for the Visual Arts (2020), Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant (2018), Artist Community Engagement Grant (2016), and the Art Matters Grant (2016). Kwak is the 2020 – 2021 Artist-in-Residence in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. Kwak received an MFA from the University of Southern California, an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kwak’s work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, ARTnews, Artillery Magazine, BOMB magazine, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and the LA Times, among others.