Agency, Fetishization, Control: Geumhyung Jeong’s Robots
At Canal Projects, New York, the artist explores connection itself with an erotic choreography of mechanical repair
At Canal Projects, New York, the artist explores connection itself with an erotic choreography of mechanical repair

The term uncanny valley can be used to describe the relation between the human-like qualities of a robot and the emotional response it evokes: the more a robot resembles us, the more unsettling it is. (Think of the well-known works of Ed Atkins and Lynn Hershman Leeson, or the horrible Yayoi Kusama robot that temporarily lived in the window display of the Louis Vuitton flagship shop on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.)

It’s a contrast, then, to encounter the work of South Korean artist and choreographer Geumhyung Jeong, whose mangled arrays of mannequin parts, metal rods, wheels, motors and exposed wiring are explicitly low-fi. ‘Toys, Selected’, the artist’s solo exhibition at Canal Projects in New York, transforms the gallery into an operating room for her DIY creations. Under clinical overhead lighting, long tables bear motorized machines in various states of repose. Arms and legs splay over table edges, dehumanized by visible networks of hardware that suggest an ongoing process of construction. For Jeong, who taught herself robotics, these ‘handmade toys’ are less feats of engineering than expressions of intimacy with her obsessive collection of electronic components, including parts salvaged from medical devices and sex toys.

Each element in the show is part of the titular installation, Toys Selected (2025). In a series of videos that play on loop in a corner of the gallery, Jeong constructs, deconstructs and tests her cast, using a remote control and physical touch. We see her robots spinning jerkily or trembling on the floor, breaking and needing to be repaired – all deliberate acts of programming. Instead of making the robots seem more human, Jeong’s meticulous handling of their bodies – plugging, lifting, tweaking, recharging – suggests a fetishistic attempt to forge connection despite her creations’ lack of autonomy.
During Toy Demo (2025), a live performance held within the exhibition, Jeong slowly moves around this cast of mechanical parts, using a remote control to lead the machines through simple motions she has developed over years of programming: slight head nods and shakes, backward and forward movement, a pelvis tilt. The performance hovers between the didacticism of a lecture – punctuated by Jeong’s deadpan commentary on how she developed each action – and the awkward choreography of a fetish ritual, unfolding in slow motion. Here, with Jeong playing the part of mother, mechanic and choreographer, the machines look like stubbornly incompetent puppets rather than collaborators. At times, she touches them softly, sensually, in ways that begin to scratch at the surface of technophilia’s erotic potential. Yet this engagement fails to address the gendered and racialized dynamics of agency, fetishization and control that her uniformly white dummy-robots bring up.

Several tables nearby hold displays of precisely assembled electronic components, evoking surgical implements or prosthetics on standby for the faltering bodies. These neat arrays suggest a false sense of mastery or coherence, risking the slick aestheticization of the slow, messy choreography of repair and maintenance that defines Jeong’s relationship to her machines. Even still, the exhibition gestures toward a different kind of uncanny – one rooted not in human mimicry, but in the emotional residue of interdependence. Far from the smooth futurism promised by AI and robotics industries, Jeong finds meaning in the sustained acts of devotion that her objects require: in the friction of care, entropy and attention enacted through clunky limbs and stubborn hardware. In their fragile absurdity, the machines point to the precarity of connection itself: human to human, human to machine and all the ambiguous space in between.
Geumhyung Jeong’s ‘Toys, Selected’ is on view at Canal Projects, New York until 26 July
Main image: Geumhyung Jeong, ‘Toys, Selected’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Canal Projects, New York; photograph: Izzy Leung