07/05/2026
Swan Moon’s Swan Moon
TBW Books 2025
Swan Moon’s Swan Moon is a diaristic portrait of youth, identity, and performance set against the faded glamour of 1990s Los Angeles. Swan Moon revisits her teenage years as a Korean American growing up in the cultural shadow of Hollywood—where cinema’s myths loomed large and personal history blurred with fantasy.
While alternative youth were raving and Larry Clark’s Kids was defining a generation, Moon and her friends were doing something profoundly divergent: dressing in vintage clothing, staging impromptu, cinematically adjacent environments, and living out an aesthetic that was wildly out of sync with the time. The work feels improvised, playful—shot with flea market props and makeshift lighting which carried with it an amateurish charm. Moon wasn’t imitating Cindy Sherman—she had yet to know that name let alone see the iconic Untitled Film Stills—but she was drawing directly from the language of cinema, attempting to insert herself and her circle within the medium’s canon.
The photographs echo mid-century domesticity—gestures borrowed from the 1950s and ’60s—but subverted through the awareness and often overwrought angst of the 1990s. Sexuality here is present but subdued, expressed with a tenderness that would soon be obliterated by the onset of the Internet’s rise. There’s humor, style and an earnest make-believe that is refreshing in light of today’s hyper self-awareness and image saturation.
Designed with a nod to Hollywood’s silver screen, Swan Moon’s Swan Moon includes a curated soundtrack and character credits at the book’s conclusion. An afterword by the esteemed writer Chris Kraus brings clarity and context to Moon’s love letter to a nostalgic Los Angeles—her version of the city and its youthful inhabitants that feels both deeply personal and entirely lost to time.
