NEW YORK, NY.- It’s not that Young Chung and Kibum Kim dislike traditional paintings, but as the owners of the gallery Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, they prefer artworks that can spin your head sideways. Their roster of 39 artists is known for eccentric practices that sometimes involve welding spacecrafts, transforming into a human disco ball and studying tree bark.

“I don’t think our clients would even know what to do if we started representing traditional painters,” Kim said, explaining that Commonwealth has supported artists who consider figurative art as a flawed approach to the thorny complexities of identity politics. Instead, the gallery has nurtured a new generation of West Coast conceptualists who apply the philosophical rigor and satirical swagger of the 1960s and ’70s to contemporary issues like marginalization and decolonization.

Chung, a longtime LA resident, and Kim, who is from South Korea, laid that groundwork over the past decade while running on the tight margins of the art business. Survival was never guaranteed — and still isn’t.

The gallery nearly closed in 2020, and its owners have been reluctant to increase overhead costs during the fizzy market of recent years. But the two dealers have persisted in taking risks on what they call “unsellable” artists who, for example, transform their bodies into cyborgian low riders (Rafa Esparza); feature electric netting and dried blood in their works (P. Staff); and hire men off Craigslist to gyrate like horseback-riding cowboys on film (Kenneth Tam).

Over the years, they built a cult following of influential curators and museum directors. And in 2022, the gallery opened a second location in Mexico City. But creating a market for great experimentalists is always challenging. Most works at their LA gallery — a modest spot near a liquor store and a Korean BBQ restaurant — cost $20,000 to $50,000.

“We are in the red,” Chung said. “We are always trying to catch up.”

Kim suggested it was part of being in the art market. “If you drew up a business plan for a gallery and went to a bank, it would be a reckless banker who gives that loan,” he explained. “I think the model is meant to be precarious, because we should all make programming decisions to champion the art that we believe in.”

If the gallery lacks financial security, it compensates with influence. The dealers represent seven artists who will be included in the Whitney Biennial in March and the Venice Biennale in April. In the meantime, employees are preparing for Frieze Los Angeles, starting Feb. 29, when seven additional artists will be featured in museum exhibits across the city, including a solo show for Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

“There are less and less galleries that have identities,” said Johanna Burton, the museum’s director. “And I really admire that Commonwealth has an actual program that is locally rooted but globally relevant.”

Burton was referring to changes in the market over the past five years, when mega-galleries have aggressively courted artists from smaller competitors. And rising costs have strained the traditional business model for galleries wanting a tightly curated program of artists working toward a common goal. That model helped define the past 40 years, when a gallery like Metro Pictures, which closed in 2021, could establish an era like the Pictures Generation by showing artists like Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine.

Burton viewed Commonwealth as reviving the programmatic model through its representation of artists whose biographies weave through the West Coast and reflect the region’s economic and racial diversity. Nearly three-quarters of the roster identify as persons of color, and half the artists are queer; many said they were raised in working-class families.

“There is a working-class aesthetic that is particular to Los Angeles,” observed Meg Onli, one of the curators behind this year’s edition of the Whitney Biennial. She said that artists from the gallery — Clarissa Tossin, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Lotus L. Kang, Nikita Gale and P. Staff — were early additions to her shortlist for the influential show because of their interest in class and identity.

“People always say nobody is from Los Angeles,” Onli said. “But Los Angeles has been a hub of art-making forever. I have been really interested in it as a site of creative production, particularly for people of color.”

Kim said the gallery often chooses artists who represent marginalized communities. “When identity is addressed more directly, it is often with a critical edge, like the work of American Artist,” whose media include sculpture, software and video, he said. American Artist, who is a lecturer at Yale School of Art, “interrogates traces of systemic racism in digital technology, a supposedly neutral arena but which often does not recognize darker faces,” Kim added.

Chung originally hosted the gallery in his one-bedroom apartment in Historic Filipinotown, staging a 2010 exhibition with Gala Porras-Kim, whose projects often involve deep research and institutional critiques.

“When we met, she was a PDF artist. The studio visit was on a laptop. But her ideas were remarkable,” Chung said.

Chung was an artist himself, who had a day job doing clerical work at a psychoanalyst’s office. But during the evenings, he would take Porras-Kim around the neighborhood.

“I made a map based on his life,” Porras-Kim said. “We went up and down the streets of Koreatown. He showed me where his dad used to take him to get rice cakes.”

The exhibition was a success as a proof of concept, though not financially. And so the gallery slowly professionalized as Chung expanded the circle of friends he exhibited. In 2011, he moved the gallery into a second-floor space about 1 mile away from his apartment and acquired a business license in 2014.

Three years later, artists staged an intervention, asking Chung to create an official roster by turning his artist-run operation into a real gallery.

Around the same time, Kibum Kim joined the gallery to focus on the financial side, allowing Chung to make the artistic program his priority. The duo have gained a cult following with collectors looking to buy from dealers who really know LA.

“My gut feeling is that they represent the city better than anyone else in town,” said Jarl Mohn, a venture capitalist and former CEO of National Public Radio until 2019. He counted at least 13 works in his collection from Commonwealth artists, including photographs by Guadalupe Rosales and Beatriz Cortez, who has a sculpture that will be in the Venice Biennale — a project that Mohn is financially supporting.

“This is not a casual affair,” Mohn said, laughing.

Commonwealth has also taken the unusual step of asking collectors and museums to donate the industry-standard 10% discounts they get on purchases toward a flexible fund that benefits artists. The idea came from a group effort among the gallery and its artists, when the gallery raised more than $100,000 for health care emergencies during the pandemic.

“I decided to participate because not all artist boats rise and fall at the same time,” said Miyoung Lee, a collector who is a vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “I hadn’t heard of this at other places. At some big galleries, artists don’t even meet, let alone support each other.”

Lee said that Commonwealth belonged to a crop of small galleries that really support emerging artists — the West Coast equivalent to 47 Canal, a gallery on New York’s Lower East Side founded in 2011 by artist Margaret Lee and dealer Oliver Newton that became popular by representing artists like Josh Kline, Anicka Yi and Elle Pérez.

Collectors cited the dedication to difficult work. In her New York apartment, Lee has a 2022 installation by P. Staff called “Love Life,” which features a holographic fan that projects poetry as its blades twirl in circles.

“It is not the easiest work to live with,” Lee admitted. “But the gallery is not going after the pretty things that sell. They are looking at the quality of the artist.”

Kim has made frequent trips to South Korea, the wellspring of a budding market for international collectors. The gallery co-represents artist Suki Seokyeong Kang, who lives in Seoul. Her minimal and modular works include the 2018 sculpture “Grandmother Tower — tow,” a haphazard column of dish racks mimicking her grandmother’s aging back.

The last time Kim lived with his parents in South Korea was 1993, whereupon he moved to the United States with his grandmother to seek a better life.

“Which is why I was very invested in traditional success in my younger years,” Kim said, referencing careers as a banker, lawyer and even a New York Times contributor. “Through the gallery, I have a more holistically rich life.”

And a life of unexpected challenges. The gallery could become a victim of its own success as the price of participating in art fairs and museum exhibitions continues to rise.

“We would love the luxury of time,” Kim said. “For artists today, the whole run of their career toward a big show can happen in three to four years. Ideally, we would have a bit longer so they can hone their art-making, experiment and make some mistakes.”

Even as its roster expands and its core artists become famous, the gallery is holding onto its hippy-dippy California charm. The dealership’s website is still organized under sections like “now,” “tomorrow,” “together” and “trust.” The gallerists are reachable via email addresses that start with “we” and “ours.”

But as Lee, the collector, said, “Scale is always an issue. How many artists can you add without losing the magic? The challenge will be how they stay special, viable.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.