Rachel Youn

April 22, 2025

Rachel Youn (b. 1994 Abington, PA) is an American artist. They received their BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and their MFA from the Yale School of Art. Youn has had solo exhibitions at Soy Capitán, Berlin, Germany; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; HAIR + NAILS, Minneapolis, MN; and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO. Youn is a recipient of the 2025 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award and the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial Award. They have participated in residencies at the Lighthouse Works, Vermont Studio Center, and will attend Bemis Center in fall 2025. Their forthcoming solo exhibition at G Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, opens April 29.

Can you tell us about your practice and how you started working with kinetic sculpture?

I’m a sculptor, and I also work with installation. I’ve been working primarily with kinetics for about seven or eight years. I repurpose motors and machines sourced and stripped from objects like exercise equipment, massagers, and baby swings. I’m interested in the artificial sense of human touch or intimacy that machines can evoke. I often incorporate fake plants and other materials to create weird, erotic, funny, pitiful sculptures.

I’m also interested in creating a sense of sympathy for objects that aren’t alive. After undergrad, I began working with soft sculptures, and the more time I spent with them, the more they started to feel like characters. Introducing movement became a natural extension. It gave them a sense of agency. Motion grabs attention, but it can also be sad or relatable in a human way.

Where do you begin when creating these works, and what’s your process like in the studio?

I usually start by sourcing junk through Facebook Marketplace. It’s important to me that the machines were previously used—they carry a narrative of once being desired and then falling into disuse when they couldn’t perform properly. Exercise equipment, fake flowers, hardware—all kinds of things. There’s an extensive collection process in the studio, and from there, I tease out what eventually becomes a sculpture.

I wish I could say the process makes sense, but it’s really intuitive—it starts with emotion. I bring these machines into the studio, test them on my body if needed, and then start stripping them apart—plastic covers, mesh, whatever. I solder and rewire, then power them up. Their movement helps me imagine how the flowers or other elements might interact, but it’s never an exact science. I use clips, tape, and zip ties to temporarily place things, then rebuild everything using stronger materials so they don’t fall apart over time. I also run them in the studio to watch how they wear down—because with kinetics, there’s always an element of decay.

Regarding the secondhand objects you source, I think you said something about wanting to find things with a sense of aspiration and failure. That framing stuck with me.

Totally. When you hit ‘buy now,’ you’re full of hope—imagining this product will transform you. But real change is mundane. It takes repetition and work. It’s never the instant, orgasmic transformation you hope for. I’m interested in that existential moment—when something, or someone, just can’t keep going anymore.

It sounds like motion really drives the process. When you’re creating the motion, are you letting the machine decide it, or are you envisioning something specific?

Early on, it was about observing the motion and extending it with fake plants. Lately, I’ve become more interested in restraining the motion—adding weight with clips, beads, and other materials to introduce a sense of gravity. It changes the feeling completely. My earlier works were wild and flailing; now they feel more trapped, more erotic. That tension is more interesting to me.

I can’t stop looking at the shoe components. How did that start, and what’s the reference there?

I started using them a few years ago because it’s an easy way to give something character without putting a face on it. It adds a bit of cuteness. I use dog shoes, Build-A-Bear sneakers, and doll shoes. Many sculptures already have rubber feet to absorb shock, so the shoes make sense functionally, too. I was also thinking about Asian furniture and ceramics, the way they have clawed or animal feet pointing in different directions. Similarly, I liked the idea of using roller skates because they suggest fast movement, but locked in place, they’re useless.

I’ve always been drawn to mascots, stuffed animals, animism, and Shintoism—the belief that non-human things can possess spirit or life. There’s something deeply fascinating to me about decorating objects with limbs or feet, as if giving them a body allows them to feel more alive.

Flowers seem to be a recurring motif. How do you choose which flowers to use?

I’m drawn to ‘exotics’—flowers that are super colorful and not native. There’s a layered history behind them. In the Victorian era, people went to great lengths, sometimes risking their lives, to bring back orchids and other plants to decorate the homes of the wealthy. I’m fascinated by that relationship to the exotic and the foreign.

Flowers also have long carried anatomical associations—limbs, vulvas, faces. People have always projected meaning onto them. By using fake flowers, I get to play with those projections—exploring desire, identification, and the uncanny within the work.

Rachel Youn

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