Toys, Selected
Geumhyung Jeong
May 9 - July 26, 2025
Opening Reception, May 9, 2025, 6–8pm
Free RSVP here.
Centering the intimate relationships between humans and technology—particularly the tensions between desire and control—Geumhyung Jeong’s Toys, Selected challenges fundamental principles of animacy and the limits of human recognition. The artist’s uncanny, handmade toys are composed of mannequin heads and arms, metal rods, batteries, and cables, while exposed wires form intricate mecha-cardiovascular systems. For Jeong, her DIY robotics are less a technical endeavor than a highly relational, animistic mode of creation. In both producing and performing, Jeong physically interacts with the robots, touching them in an equalizing, sensual, even fetishistic way—suggesting an erotics of technology.
Though Jeong’s robots remain motionless, indicative of sleep or pause, their expressive postures signal their latent potential for movement. Video documentation of Jeong assembling and testing the machines accompany the installation, focusing the viewer’s attention on the subtle movements of both the artist and her machines. The video works elaborate on the lives of the robots, showcasing them in motion as they fall, break, and need to be repeatedly repaired. Jeong deliberately programs the robots to require an almost obsessive level of care and attention. Rather than striving for fluid movement or convincing human mimicry, Jeong’s practice finds ideological productivity in the physical limitations and imperfections of the machine, bridging them closer to humanity. When a mechanical apparatus appears to need human assistance, what emotions are extended and how do they change? Do machines truly need our care and help, or is it we who ultimately need them?
Illuminated by clinical overhead lighting, the tabletop stations take on the appearance of an operating room with sterile surgical implements and prosthetics on standby. In this way, the exhibition further complicates the idea of the operator or the remote control. With Jeong as both an overseeing technician and orchestrator of an intimate machinist choreography, it is ambiguous who is in control of whom, and who cares for whom in the increasingly entangled relationship between human and machine. Questioning the core animating principles and building blocks of life, intelligence, somatic and emotional experience, Jeong’s works beckon us to consider our own physical and emotional existence as part of a larger technological choreography.
Geumhyung Jeong (b. 1980 in Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Seoul, Korea. Jeong has participated in performing arts festivals internationally and had solo exhibitions in international contemporary art institutions including: Upgrade in Progress, FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena (2020); Homemade RC Toy, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2019); Private Collection: Unperformed Objects, Delfina Foundation, London (2017); Tate Live: Geumhyung Jeong, Tate Modern, London (2017); Private Collection, Atelier Hermès, Seoul (2016).
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including: The Milk of Dreams, The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022); Copenhagen – Red Light Green Light (In the Realm of the Senses), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022); Immortality, The 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg (2019); APT9 The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2018); ANTI, AB6 The 6th Athens Biennale, Athens (2018); The Public Body 02, Artspace, Sydney (2017); The Promise of Total Automation, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2016); Surround Audience: New Museum Triennial 2015, New Museum, New York (2015); The Beast and the Sovereign, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporan de Barcelona, Barcelona (2015); East Asia Feminism: FANTasia, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Gesture, WKV Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2014); Burning Down the House, The 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2014). In 2016 Jeong was the winner of the Hermès Foundation Missulsang Award and in 2014 of Zürcher Theater Spektakel Kantonalbank Acknowledgment Prize. In 2009 she won the Excellence Award for Alternative Vision at the Seoul New Media Art Festival and in 2007 Dokkebi Award at the Chuncheon International Mime Festival.
