About this Event
Join us for the opening celebration of Young Joon Kwak’s exhibition, RESISTERHOOD.
Young Joon Kwak's work begins with touch. Molds and imprints of bodies - the artist's own, and those of friends, loved ones, and collaborators - are dis- and re-assembled, burnished and jeweled. The resulting works bear intimate human traces and yet remain anonymous, moving in and out of recognition. They shimmer in their distortions and imperfections, presenting us with bodies both frozen in time and in perpetual transition: in the midst of youth, aging, gestation, or gender transformation.
RESISTERHOOD includes new commissions and works made over the past ten years, a series of neon sculptures for the Museum's public window gallery, and a soundscape composed by Xina Xurner (Kwak and Marvin Astorga) with Johanna Hedva, Anna Luisa, and Dorian Wood. Taken together, these artworks are a mobilizing call for a new politics of queer and trans resistance: embracing a playful erotics, and celebrating imperfection, abjection, ambiguity, and uncategorizable ways of looking and being.
Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984, Queens, New York) is a Los Angeles-based sculptor, performance artist, and the founder of Mutant Salon, a queer-transfem-BIPOC collective beauty salon and collaborative art and performance platform. 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. Learn more about Young Joon Kwak here.
Curated by Stamatina Gregory, Head Curator / Director of Exhibitions and Collections
About the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art provides a platform for artistic exploration through multi-faceted queer perspectives. We embrace the power of the arts to inspire, explore, and foster understanding of the rich diversity of LGBTQIA+ experiences. We aim to be a home for queer art, artists, scholars, activists and allies, and a catalyst for discourse on art and queerness. With a collection of over 30,000 objects and a research library of over 3,000 volumes, the Museum fosters experimentation and research through exhibitions, programs, educational platforms, and publications.
Accessibility
Located at 26 Wooster Street, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art strives to provide a welcoming environment to all visitors. Five external steps lead to our entrance doors: a wheelchair lift is available. All galleries are wheelchair-accessible, and a single-occupancy accessible restroom is located behind the visitor services desk: all restrooms are gender-neutral. Large print didactics are available.
For questions or access requests, please email [email protected] with 1 week advance of your visit.
ID: A hand bent at the wrist. The hand is dipped in grey clay-like material.
IC: Young Joon Kwak, Uh, As If! (still), 2014. HD video (color, sound). Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
