Young Joon Kwak

My practice moves beyond the confines of the studio, gallery, stage, and institution, into interstitial social realms. I collaborate with my community of femme, queer, trans, POC artists and performers as the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon and platform for performances that experiment with heterogeneous forms of social engagement. This collective endeavor explores alternatives for inhabiting a world in which “other” bodies are increasingly objectified, exploited, and policed. My sculptures, video, sound, and performances push the plasticity of materials and use found objects, costuming, props, and digital technologies to propose different ways of viewing and interpreting bodies, objects, and spaces as mutable and open-ended.