Young Joon Kwak (they/she) is a Los Angeles-based sculptor and performance artist whose work challenges the boundaries of representation through inventive techniques of masking and camouflage. Kwak’s art generates new and embodied forms of connection and interaction with others that go beyond traditional categories of gender and race, while vividly imagining new spaces for marginalized bodies to thrive. 

Kwak electrifies audiences as the lead performer of the drag-electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. Kwak also founded Mutant Salon, a dynamic collective beauty salon and nexus for queer-trans-fem-POC artistic collaboration. Solo and collaborative exhibition venues include Arko Art Center, Seoul; Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre, Alberta. Group exhibition and performance venues include Hauser & Wirth, New York; Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Art Museum of the National University of Colombia, Bogotá; and the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living