Vacuum cleaners, personal massagers, electronic baby rockers, and walking pads: These are the secondhand machines Rachel Youn sources to create their kinetic sculptures. Made with artificial flowers, metal hardware, and these used electronic components, each one possesses a humanlike presence.

Slow Burn is made from an artificial orchid, a neck massager, bits of metal that clamp the orchids’ petals, and a monitor mount attaching the entire apparatus to a gallery wall. A motor on the massager animates metal rods that force the orchid open and close, a visual that feels caged in its sexuality, a flower forced to furl and unfurl infinitely for the viewer. Its repetitive movements allude to the way a person can become trapped in a comforting loop, endlessly rotating on a circular path of self-destruction. Youn even remarks on the way their sculptures have a lifecycle of their own, with motors burning out and mechanical hardware grinding itself into nothing inside galleries.

Often sourcing parts from various used household electronics found on Facebook Marketplace, the artwork elicits affection, sadness, and eroticism in the viewer. The works raise questions about domestic and sexual labor, human comfort, and the relationships we make 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 learn that you wanted to become an artist?

I grew up in a Baptist Christian Korean immigrant household, which had its own set of complications. I think the typical immigrant story is that your parents want you to be a doctor or a lawyer or something. My dad wanted me to go into the Air Force. That was never gonna happen. But, they didn’t really discourage me from doing art.

Then I had a scholarship through school, so they weren’t going to protest. The themes of things I experienced growing up have crept into the work in ways that I didn’t really expect. I think about the performance of the self or especially of womanhood, especially in the church, a lot.

Being a pastor’s daughter, seeing my mom being a pastor’s wife, how you have to present yourself a certain way, has been in the background of my mind. Fun childhood. I grew up with a lot of shame and Christian guilt. My family said it’s okay for you to do art as long as you spread the word of God through your work. And I was like, yeah, I will certainly do that.

Low-key, 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.

Lots of people are spiritual or want something to believe in. And I totally agree with that and feel that the same, but it will not be through organized religion. I’m fighting against it. My hope for the future is that people are mov[ing] away from ideology and more dogmatic spirituality. I guess we’ll see if it stays that way. But I feel that is what people want.

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

I got started with illustration and really loved animation. Was I cut out for it? Probably not. So I ended up studying sculpture in undergrad.

I really had no precedent for sculpture. I’d never done anything three-dimensional and working in shops scared me. I was interested in animation and how expressive and identifiable cartoons are. That has a relationship to the work I have now because there’s an anthropomorphic characteristic to the work, even though it’s sculpture, and there’s no faces in it. People see these sculptures doing their weird motions, and they kind of find it funny or pitiful or there’s something to relate to. That’s 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 super specific and hyperrealistic, it allows more people access points in. That’s been my way of expressing themes that I’m interested in without always making it just about myself. My sculptures are gestures of feelings like frustration, and now they’re kind of getting more erotic.

And it’s fun, because there’s all these surprises that emerge from the work through the process that I can’t always predict. To circle back to the question, I started playing with kinetics through these massagers, because they were slow and they’re ways for me to study how they move without having to build everything from scratch, which I didn’t have the capability to do.

Then I started putting fake plants on them. There was so much charged narrative that came with both the machines and the fake plants that they became their own thing. Especially over the past couple years, I’ve really pushed more of the anthropomorphism, where now some have shoes or limbs without the specificity of a face. There’s still something figurative about them, they’re almost little miniature characters.

It’s like that meme. “Evolution, can you give me pattern-seeking brain to avoid predators?”

There’s studies done about that on people who are more religious, funnily enough. Looking for signs of Jesus in the toast or the tree or whatever. There’s something so cool and uncanny about the ability to identify with something that’s obviously not a person or even an animal. It says a lot about the people who project onto it that they can have something, a real emotion, directed towards something that can’t receive it.

It’s an interesting conversation to be had right now, in the age of being addicted to AI chatbots.

AI learns to cater to the subject, and I think that’s comforting and also really strange, because the reality of having an intimate relationship with another person is that you cannot control everything about them or you can’t predict their emotions.

It’s easy to catastrophize it.

But hyper-post-whatever-capitalism makes us really lonely. Automated machines, like massagers, are meant to make it easy to get this kind of experience without having to go interact with a person. And now you can basically go home from work and be fully immersed in a self-created environment, without interacting with other people at all.

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

Kind of by accident. I wasn’t like, oh, I’m gonna make this work sexy.

It just kind of happened, and I was honestly kind of embarrassed. I never really tried to make work about eroticism, or pleasure.

On one hand, I feel the works are expressing their own sexuality, through the way I’ve configured them. These machines are meant to perform a job endlessly without complaint. Repurposing them and then making them into these sculptures that project eroticism to a viewer, but also many times to an empty gallery. They move on and on. Its endless repetition to the point of failure.

I think about how sexuality is very mundane, too. You can have too much of a good thing. You can masturbate forever.

It’s not going to feel good after a while. The machines get to have pleasure, but then the pleasure is stuck in a repetitive cycle. If you’re not having a contrast to pleasure, what is pleasure actually?

One of the cheesy things I repeat a lot is that the most important thing in life is contrast. You have to have something to look forward to, or a change. Humans have emotional breaking points. Sometimes you can go to work endlessly and do the same thing every single day for years. And then at some point, you just rage quit. In familial or romantic relationships, there’s a comfort in repetition. And then one day, “I can’t do this anymore.”

The idea of the housewife who performs these many labors and then becomes a hysteric. And then people go “ Why did my wife go crazy?” when she’s been doing the same thing every single day.

What do you think about when you’re sourcing machines for your work?

I buy these massage machines secondhand. So obviously, for something to be sold means that it is no longer wanted. The narrative is that it was desired for a purpose, and it failed that purpose, which was to comfort the body.

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

I’ve heard you talk about how when you’re selling the work, sometimes it breaks down. There’s a lifecycle to these pieces.

It’s something I’ll always have to address. I’ve run into a situation before [where] something like that happens. Then somebody has to let me know, and then I have to have the time and care to instruct on how to fix things or replace parts. Even if somebody buys something, they have to understand that this is a finite machine.

Because I’ve received them used, they could have been used 500 times and then sold. I don’t even know where they are in their lifespan. Moving forward, I want to be able to make more of my own mechanisms and not rely on the mass-produced ones. But that means I have to have a specific knowledge, and 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 to be tended to, like bodies. I do actually want them to last long. I’m demanding something of them that they can’t promise either.

Anybody else who’s done kinetic work has their own story about something breaking or failing. Paintings and sculptures and ceramics and all that stuff degrades over time too.

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

You could see it as the museum showing the carcasses of these beings. In a way, you get to see them rest and they don’t have to work anymore. And there’s something really beautiful about that.

It helps me to think about relationships to the things I own, like my car. I don’t expect my car to run forever. Do I want it to run as long as possible? Yes. Does that require good maintenance and care? Yes. I have to treat it with care, even if it’s not a person. Objects and possessions come into our lives and leave just the way that people do too.