Youn’s sculptures can seem self-destructive. They bump into one another and they are liable to fall off their plinths, and their engines due to combust. But their way around the perils of existence is a different one in which nothingness is not a real possibility—the massagers may be broken, but they are far from gone. For while Revival is festive, pleasurable and fun, its title also suggests a zombie-like state of reanimation or half-life. If flowers are ordinarily understood, per the logic of vanitas painting, as reminders of mortality, what of those made out of plastic? Are they not the still more dreadful reminders of things that refuse to pass? Things that stubbornly, claustrophobically, even manically, remain?

Text by Kristian Vistrup Madsen. Read the full text on Revival here.

Rachel Youn (1994, PA), a current MFA candidate in Sculpture at Yale, crafts kinetic sculptures of plastic dollar-store flowers affixed to Goodwill-sourced electric massage machines, wildly flailing around in the air, pulled and pushed. The pieces speak to Youn’s intersectional experience growing up as a non-binary Korean-American in the American Midwest.

Venturing into the suburbs, Youn rescues electric massagers from “suburban limbo”, fastening artificial plants to the machines to create works that are clumsy, erotic, and absurd. Their work identifies with the replica that earnestly desires to be real, and the failed object that simulates care and intimacy.