Les Joynes

US. Born Southern California. Lives and Works in New York.

Les Joynes (US, b 1963) is a multimedia contemporary artist based in New York. His practice bridges cross-cultural collaboration, site-specific performance, and experimental film. Born in California and living in Asia, Europe and the Americas Joynes’s work is deeply rooted in exploring cultural identities, historical narratives, and the impact of place on human experience. Trained in London then Tokyo in the 1990s, Joynes uses a bundle of media practices including photography, sculpture, painting, performance and moving image. Inspired by Richard Serra nad a focus on what is at stake - targeting the labor of artmaking - that is consonant with relational aesthetics. Joynes turns the studio inside out where these investigations explore materials, body movements, shared spaces and exploring the alterity produced through geographically dispersed practice.

Joynes creates immersive, site-specific collaborative works that invite audiences into a complex dialogue on the nature of memory, tradition, and transnational relational aesthetics. His work challenges traditional art boundaries by incorporating unorthodox materials and involving communities as active participants. He challenges the roles of the contemporary artist and their relationship to traditional cultures, the gallery, market, auction, contemporary art.

At the core of his practice is FormLAB, an experimental series of cross-cultural performances and installations, which has exhibited in museums, galleries and public spaces in Beijing, São Paulo, Seoul, Tokyo, and New York. Engaging the elements of chance foster by intercultural performance, FormLAB draws inspiration from Andre Breton’s exploration of chance and gravity and Robert Smithson’s expiration of site and entropy. Joynes brings these explorations into shared spaces, ad-hoc procedures and dialogues across borders where artists invent new methodologies of production. as a cultural and museum intervention, FormLAB has mined elements of ritual, anthropology, and storytelling in Brazil, South Korea, Mongolian and India to reveal shared human experiences.

Combining art production in tandem with cross-disciplinary research, his projects have featured at the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature (2023), ByWoods Gallery, Kaohsiung, Taiwan (2023), Douba Film Festival, China (2019), Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing (2017), Museum of Brazilian Arts (MAB-FAAP), Sao Paulo, Brazil (2015), Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (2014), 976 Gallery, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Launch for Venice Biennale (2014), Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo (2013), Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paulo (2012), Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Korea (2012), Fenberger House Museum, Nagano, Japan (2012), Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York (2011), Welsh Museum of Modern Art, UK (2010), Treignac Projet, France (2010), Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau, Berlin and Queenstown, Singapore (2009), Åmotgård Museum, Bygstad, Norway (2008), Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York (2008), New General Catalog, New York (2007), CBGB New York (2006), Space, London (2005), Romo Gallery, Atlanta (2005), Mizuma Gallery Tokyo (2005), Bergstübl Mitte, Berlin (2004), Mars, Tokyo (2003), Tactical Museum/ AIT, Tokyo (2002), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2001), Nylon, London (2000), Asahi Contemporary Art 2000, Tokyo (2000), Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Bangkok (1999), Tatsumi Orimoto Space, Kawasaki, Japan (1999), Casa, Tokyo (1998), Norimatsu Museum, Japan (1997), Milch, London (1996), Barbican, London (1995).

He is recipient of the Japan Ministry of Culture/ MeXT Scholarship, the Taiwan Ministry of Education Scholarship, Fulbright US Public Diplomacy Awards for China and Mongolia and US ZERO1 Art and Technology/American Arts Incubator Artist. Also a curator, he has curated exhibition in London, Tokyo and New Delhi and serves as a selector for Japan Contemporaries. At Columbia University’s Department of Art History, Joynes was hosted by Jonathan Crary to research how artists recreate museum spaces and has lectured on the future of museums at Museum 2050 at the long Museum in Shanghai.

He served on the curatorial team that produced the 1998 Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan and has curated and produced exhibitions in Tokyo, London and New Delhi. He has published in Art in America;Art Monthly London, Journal for Artistic Research (JAR); University of Indiana Press; Chithravathi (Magazine); India, Serbia Museum of Contemporary Art [catalogue]; Long Museum, Shanghai; in Going Beyond: Art as Adventure, Newcastle; Anywhere v.1. University of Melbourne; LeRoy Neiman Foundation; Octopus, Journal for Visual Culture. University of California Irvine and Springer, Vienna.

Joynes holds a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, BA from Boston University, MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and MA Fine Art from Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Joynes furthered his research in cross-cultural collaboration during his PhD from the Faculty of Art, Environment, and Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK and Postdoctorate at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. His work is in private and public collections in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Joynes is represented by Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in New York.