Young Joon Kwak & Mutant Salon Summer Residency: CAVERNOUS- Opening

Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984 in Queens, NY) is a LA-based multi-disciplinary artist working primarily through sculpture, performance, video, and collaboration. Her work aims to change how we view our bodies by reimagining their form, functionality, and materiality—from static and bound to pre-inscribed power structures, to an expanded sense of bodies and their environs as mutable and open-ended. She 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; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Pavillon Vendôme Centre d’Art Contemporain, Clichy, France. During Summer 2018, Kwak will be the Artist-in-Residence at LACE (LA). 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, MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mutant Salon is a beauty salon and roving platform for collaborative performance and community-building that strives to foster connections between queer, trans, POC, womyn and mutant communities to celebrate an ethos of transformation and critical togetherness in the act of self care. In addition to offering haircuts, psychic readings, makeup, nails, tattoos, and other treatments, Mutant Salon embraces a continual metamorphosis of itself with each iteration to offer new aesthetic experiences and experimental modes of engagement with an audience.