Artist Rachel Youn ©G Gallery
Korean-American
artist Rachel Youn (b. 1994) has been named one of the 20 artists featured in
"New Talent 2025," announced by the internationally renowned art
magazine Art in America.
Art
in America has presented its “New Talent” special feature annually since 1954, spotlighting
20 emerging artists to watch. The series was discontinued in 1966 but was
revived in 2021. Last year, Korean artist Haena Yoo was selected as part of the
list.
Installation view of 《Pleasure
Circuit》 (Soy Capitán, Berlin, 2024) ©Rachel Youn
Working primarily in sculpture and
installation, Rachel Youn creates uncanny yet humorous works by combining
artificial plants and other objects with secondhand machines—massage chairs,
fitness equipment, and motorized baby products—that were originally intended to
assist with self-improvement or to simulate human care and emotion.
In Youn’s work, these objects mimic the
warmth of human touch but ultimately produce hollow gestures that affect
nothing, merely occupying space with mechanical motion. The artificial
plants—evoking the most synthetic form of life—are attached to these machines,
twisting the intent behind technologies designed to fulfill desires for
pleasure, recovery, and self-betterment. Through this pairing, Youn satirically
exposes the emotional and sensory deficiencies that these devices try, in vain,
to visually or physically compensate for.
Rachel Youn, No Pain
No Gain, 2022-2025, Walking band, wood, paint, brass, vinyl, cotton
rope, cotton thread, hardware, motor, dead battery, found moving waterfall
picture frame, monitor arm, 63 x 60 x 145 cm ©G Gallery
Rachel Youn’s first solo exhibition in
Korea, 《NO SWEAT》, currently on
view at G Gallery, features an installation that evokes two bodily,
human-centered environments: the gym and the sauna. Objects that were once
designed to assist the human body are reconfigured as independent “bodies”
themselves, forming a landscape of physicality marked by accumulation—of
failure, of comfort.
These forms, embodying a deeply human
desire for transformation without effort, endlessly repeat strange gestures in
a space of inertia that guarantees nothing. The exhibition suggests a poignant
irony: the pursuit of self-betterment without sweat unfolds in a mechanical
cycle of motion divorced from result.
《NO SWEAT》 runs
through May 31, and essays on the “New Talent 2025” artists, including Youn,
will be published sequentially on the Art in America website.
