Anthropomorphic sculpture made from fake flowers and neck massager

A vacuum cleaner, a personal massager, an electronic baby bouncer and a walking mat: these are the second-hand machines Rachel Youn uses to create kinetic sculptures. Made from artificial flowers, metal hardware and these used electronic components, each piece has a human presence.

slow burn The installation is made from artificial orchids, a neck massager, metal pieces that clamp the orchid petals, and a monitor stand that secures the entire device to the gallery wall. A motor on the massager drives a metal rod that forces the orchid to open and close, a visual effect that evokes the feeling of being imprisoned in sexual desire, a flower forced to curl and unroll indefinitely for the viewer. Its repetitive movements suggest that a person might be trapped in a comfort loop, spinning endlessly on a circular path of self-destruction. You even commented that their sculptures have their own life cycle, with motors burning out and mechanical hardware grinding to pieces in the gallery.

The artworks, often sourced from parts sourced from a variety of second-hand home electronics found on Facebook Marketplace, elicit feelings of fondness, sadness, and eroticism in the viewer. These works raise questions about domestic and sexual labor, human comfort, and our relationship with the machines we use in our daily lives. We caught up with Youn to tell us more about their anthropomorphic work.

How did you know you wanted to be an artist?

I grew up in a Baptist Christian Korean immigrant family, which had its own complications. I think the typical immigration story is that your parents want you to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. My father wanted me to join the Air Force. That will never happen. But, they didn’t really stop me from doing art.

Then I got a scholarship through the school so they wouldn’t protest. Themes from things I experienced growing up have seeped into the work in ways I never expected. I often think about the representation of myself, especially the representation of women, especially in the church.

Being a pastor’s daughter and seeing my mom being a pastor’s wife, how you have to carry yourself in a certain way was always in the back of my mind. Fun childhood. I grew up with a lot of shame and Christian guilt. My family says you can do art as long as you spread the word of God through your work. I was like, yeah, I’m definitely going to do that.

To keep a low profile, I am a closet atheist. My family definitely didn’t know that whole part of my life. As it should be.

Many people are spiritual or want to believe in something. I totally agree with that and feel the same way, but it doesn’t come through organized religion. I’m fighting against it. My hope for the future is that people are moving away from ideology and more dogmatic spirituality. I guess we’ll see if it stays that way. But I think that’s what people want.

Can you explain how your work evolved through practice into what it is today?

I started getting into illustration and really enjoyed animation. Am I suitable for this? Probably not. So I ended up studying sculpture as an undergraduate.

I really had no precedent for sculpture. I’d never done anything three-dimensional and working in a shop terrified me. I’m interested in animation and the expressiveness and recognizability of cartoons. This is related to my current work because this work has anthropomorphic features even though it is a sculpture and there is no face in it. When people see these sculptures doing strange movements, they feel funny or pitiful or have some connection. That’s the magic of animation, something that live-action movies can’t do. It’s like when Disney started doing all the live action shows.

When something isn’t super specific and super realistic, it allows more people to get into it. It’s my way of expressing topics that interest me, without always just focusing on myself. My sculptures are expressions of emotions such as frustration, now they have become more erotic.

It’s fun because there are all these surprises at work in a process that I can’t always predict. Back to the question, I started studying dynamics through these massagers because they were slow and they were a way for me to study how they moved without having to build everything from scratch, which I didn’t have the ability to do.

Then I started putting fake plants on top. Both the machines and the fake plants are imbued with narratives so rich that they become their own thing. Especially in the past few years, I’ve really pushed for more anthropomorphism, and now there are people who have shoes or limbs, but not the specificity of a face. There’s still something symbolic about them, they’re almost minor characters.

That’s it memes. “Evolution, can you give me a brain that looks for patterns to hide from predators?”

Interestingly, one study looked at more religious people. Look for signs of Jesus on toast or in a tree or wherever. It’s a very cool and incredible ability to be able to identify something that is clearly not a human or even an animal. It says a lot about those who project onto it, that they can have something, a real emotion, directed towards those who cannot receive it.

It’s an interesting conversation in an age obsessed with artificial intelligence chatbots.

Artificial intelligence has learned to cater to this theme, which I think is both gratifying and strange, because the reality of having an intimate relationship with another person is that you can’t control everything about them, or you can’t predict their emotions.

It could easily lead to disaster.

But post-super capitalism makes us really alone anyway. Automated machines like massagers are designed to make this experience easy for you, without the need for human interaction. Now you can basically go home from get off work and be completely immersed in the environment of your own creation, without having to interact with others at all.

Can you talk about how porn is integrated into your work?

A bit unexpected. It’s not like, oh, I’m going to make this job sexy.

It just happened and I’m honestly a little embarrassed that it just happened. I’ve never really tried to make work about erotica or pleasure.

On the one hand, I feel like these pieces express their own sexuality through the way I configure them. These machines are designed to perform endless jobs without complaints. Repurposing them and then making them into these sculptures projects eroticism to the viewer, but also many times to empty galleries. They move on. It repeats endlessly until it fails.

I think sex is pretty mundane too. You can have too much of a good thing. You can masturbate forever.

I think they call it “Gu Gu.”

It won’t feel comfortable after a while. The machine gets happy, but then that happiness gets stuck in a repetitive cycle. If you don’t compare it to happiness, what is happiness?

One cheesy thing I always repeat is that the most important thing in life is contrast. You have to have some expectations, or changes. Human beings have emotional breaking points. Sometimes you can work endlessly, doing the same thing every day for years. And then at some point, you just rage quit. In a family or romantic relationship, repetition brings comfort. And then one day, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Housewives take on so much labor and then become hysterical. Then people ask “Why is my wife crazy?” when she does the same thing every day.

What do you think when purchasing a machine for your job?

I buy these massage machines second hand. Obviously, selling something means no longer needing it. The narrative is that it was desired for a purpose, but it failed to serve that purpose, which was to comfort the body.

If they run for hundreds of hours, eventually, some of them will die. Because of this culture of convenience and planned obsolescence, it’s much easier to throw it away and buy something similar to replace it, then figure out how to fix it or take ownership of the process.

I’ve heard you say that when you sell your work, sometimes it falls apart. These parts have a life cycle.

This is something I will always have to deal with. I’ve been in similar situations before. Then someone has to let me know, and then I have to have the time and energy to direct how to fix things or replace parts. Even if someone buys something, they have to understand that it’s a limited machine.

Since I received them second hand, they were probably used 500 times and then sold. I don’t even know where they were all their lives. Going forward, I hope to be able to make more of my own mechanics rather than rely on mass-produced ones. But that means I have to have specific knowledge, I have to know how things are built and build my own instruction manual so that when something goes wrong we can fix it.

Because of entropy, and because machines need to be cared for just like bodies. I do hope they last a long time. I made demands of them that they couldn’t commit to either.

Anyone else who has ever done dynamic work has their own story about something breaking or failing. Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, all these things also degrade over time.

The challenge of something that should increase in value over time.

You can think of it as a museum displaying the corpses of these creatures. In a way, you can see them taking a break and they don’t have to work anymore. This is indeed wonderful.

It helps me think about my relationship with the things I own, like my car. I don’t want my car to run forever. Do I want it to run as long as possible? Yes. Does this require good maintenance and upkeep? Yes. I have to be careful with it, even if it’s not a person. Things and possessions enter and leave our lives in the same way that people do.

Youn’s work is currently exhibited at Cleo Project Space, Savannah, Georgia, Until April 25, 2026.