MATRIX 285 / Young Joon Kwak: Resistance Pleasure

Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984, Queens, New York) works across sculpture, performance, and video, moving between formal abstraction and bodily figuration to create works that resist the boundaries of representation. MATRIX 285 / Young Joon Kwak: Resistance Pleasure presents a newly commissioned installation by the Los Angeles-based artist. Using a mixture of resin, metal, and other synthetic and organic materials, Kwak casts the human form--their own and those of friends and collaborators. In these sculptures, the body is fragmented and installed throughout the gallery to suggest a series of movements or gestures within the space. With their distinctive materials and surfaces, Kwak's sculptures draw attention to the details and postures of the body even as they render it in new ways. These transformations and disorientations of the figure invite close and careful acts of looking. Kwak's sculptures demonstrate the complex ways that we see and recognize one another and prompt an imagining of new ways of being and belonging.