Sculptures made of artificial flowers and neck massagers

Vacuum cleaners, personal massagers, electronic baby vibrators, walking pads: these are the second-hand machines that Rachel Yoon uses to create her kinetic sculptures. Made of artificial flowers, metal hardware, and electronic components used, each possesses a human presence.

Slow burning It is made of an artificial orchid flower, a neck massager, hardware that holds the orchid petals, and a display stand that attaches the entire device to the gallery wall. The motor in the massager moves the metal rods that force the orchid to open and close, an image that appears to be trapped in its own sexuality, a flower forced to twist and unfold endlessly for the viewer. Its repetitive movements indicate the way a person can become trapped in a comfortable loop, endlessly revolving on a circular path of self-destruction. Yoon even pointed out the way their sculptures have a life cycle of their own, as engines burn out and mechanical devices grind themselves into nothingness inside the galleries.

Often sourced from parts of various used home electronics found on Facebook Marketplace, the artwork evokes affection, sadness and eroticism in the viewer. The works raise questions about domestic and sexual labor, human comfort, and the relationships we have with the machines we use in our daily lives. We caught up with Yoon to tell us more about their holographic work.

How did you know you wanted to become an artist?

I grew up in a Korean Christian Baptist immigrant family, which had its own set of complexities. I think the typical immigrant story is that your parents want you to become a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. My father wanted me to go into the Air Force. This will never happen. But they didn’t really discourage me from doing art.

Then I got a scholarship through school, so they didn’t protest. The themes of things I experienced growing up crept into the work in ways I didn’t really expect. I think a lot about the performance of self or more specifically femininity, especially in church.

Being a pastor’s daughter, and seeing my mother being a pastor’s wife, and how you have to present yourself a certain way, was in the back of my mind. Fun childhood. I grew up with a lot of Christian shame and guilt. My family said it was okay to do art as long as you were spreading the word of God through your work. So I said yes, I will definitely do that.

On a low level, I’m a closeted atheist. There’s definitely a whole part of my life that my family doesn’t know about. As it should be.

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

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

I started with illustration and really loved animation. Was I cut for this? Maybe not. So I ended up studying sculpture in undergrad.

I really had no precedent for sculpting. I had never done anything in 3D and working in stores scared me. I was interested in cartoons and how expressive and identifiable cartoons are. This has to do with the work I’m doing now because there’s an anthropomorphic quality to the work, even though it’s sculptural, and there are no faces in it. People see these sculptures doing their strange movements, and they find them funny or pathetic or there is something relatable to them. This is an amazing thing about animation that you can’t do with live action. Like when Disney started doing everything live-action.

When something isn’t too specific and too realistic, it allows more people to get to the points. It was my way of expressing the topics I cared about without always making it just about myself. My sculptures are nods to emotions like frustration, and now they’re kind of more exciting.

And it’s fun, because there are all these surprises that come out of the work throughout the process that I can’t always predict. To return to the question, I started playing with movement through these massagers, because they were slow and they were ways 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 artificial plants on it. There was so much charged narrative that came with both the fake machines and factories that they became their own thing. Especially over the last couple of years, I’ve really pushed more anthropomorphism, as some now have shoes or limbs without facial specificity. There is still something symbolic about them, they are almost miniature figures.

It’s like this Mimi. “Evolution, can you give me a brain that searches for patterns to avoid predators?”

There are studies done on this in more religious people, funny enough. I look for signs of Jesus in the toast or the tree or something else. There is something very wonderful and strange about being able to identify with something that is clearly not a person or even an animal. It tells us a lot about people who imagine they can have something, a real emotion, directed toward something they cannot receive.

It’s an interesting conversation now, in the age of addiction to AI-powered chatbots.

The AI ​​learns how to approach the subject, and I think that’s a really comforting and strange thing, 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 feelings.

It’s easy to destroy it.

But post-capitalist excess leaves us truly alone. Automated machines, such as massagers, aim to make it easier to have this type of experience without having to interact with anyone. Now you can come home from work and fully immerse yourself in an environment you created yourself, without interacting with others at all.

Can you talk about the way eroticism finds its way into your work?

Kind of a coincidence. I wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to make this work exciting.

It just kind of happened, and I was honestly kind of embarrassed. I’ve never tried to make work that was about being erotic or fun.

On the one hand, I feel that the works express their own sexuality, through the way I have composed them. These machines are meant to perform a job endlessly without complaint. Repurposing them and then turning them into these sculptures that display eroticism to the viewer, but also many times to an empty gallery. They move on and on. Endless repetition to the point of failure.

I think about how sex life is so normal too. You can get too much of a good thing. You can masturbate forever.

I think they call it “going”.

I won’t feel good after a while. Machines have fun, but the fun is stuck in a repetitive cycle. If you don’t have a contradiction with pleasure, then what actually is pleasure?

A cliché I often repeat is that the most important thing in life is contrast. You must have something to look forward to, or change. Humans have emotional breaking points. Sometimes you can go to work endlessly and do the same thing every day for years. And then at some point, you stop being angry. In familial or romantic relationships, there is comfort in repetition. And one day, “I can’t do this anymore.”

The idea of ​​a housewife doing so much work and then becoming hysterical. Then people say, “Why did my wife go crazy?” When she did the same thing every day.

What do you think when you supply machinery for your business?

I buy these massage machines used. Obviously, selling something means that it is no longer wanted. The narration is that it was desired for a purpose, and it failed in that purpose, which is physical comfort.

If they ran for hundreds of hours, eventually, some of them would die. Because of the culture of convenience and planned obsolescence, it’s 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 talk about how when you sell a business, sometimes it falls apart. There is a life cycle to these pieces.

It’s something I always have to address. I’ve been in a situation before (where) something like this happened. Then someone has to tell me, and then I have to have the time and attention to instruct me on how to fix things or replace parts. Even if someone buys something, they have to understand that this is a limited machine.

Because I received it used, I could have used it 500 times and then sold it. I don’t even know where they are in their lives. Moving forward, I want to be able to make more of my own mechs and not rely on mass produced mechs. But that means I have to have specific knowledge, I have to know how things are built and build my own instruction manuals, so that when something fails, we can fix it.

Because of entropy and because machines need care, like bodies. I actually want them to last a long time. I’m demanding something they can’t promise either.

Everyone else who has done a move has their own story about something breaking or failing. Paintings, sculptures, ceramics and all that stuff decomposes over time as well.

The challenge of something that is supposed to increase in value over time.

You can see that it is a museum that displays the bodies of these creatures. In a way, you can see them relaxing and not having to work anymore. And there’s something really beautiful about that.

It helps me think about my relationships with things I own, like my car. I don’t expect my car to last forever. Do I want it to last as long as possible? Yes. Does it require good maintenance and care? Yes. I have to handle him carefully, even if he is not a person. Objects and possessions enter and leave our lives as do people as well.

Yoon’s works are currently on display at Cleo The Project Space in Savannah, Georgia, Until April 25, 2026.