The Labor of Play: “Toys, Selected” at Canal Projects, New York
Author: Jiwon Geum
Tensions between domination and submission within the human and the human-made are at the forefront in Toys, Selected, Geumhyung Jeong’s first New York solo exhibition, organized by Canal Projects with curatorial contributions by Summer Guthrey, former Artistic Director, and Sofia Thiệu D'Amico, former Assistant Curator. Upon entering the gallery space, audiences familiar with it will notice the lowered lighting settings, which immediately remind us of a manufacturing factory. The exhibition showcases Jeong’s latest ‘toys,’ as she calls them: more than a dozen human–machine centaurs (Ancient Greek: κένταυρος, kentauros)—fusions of crash test dummies with chips, wheels, tires, steel beams, and weights—spread bare across tables raised to adult pelvic height. They are at once aggressive and mystical, revealing a taxonomic and anatomical impulse. At a glance, it is reminiscent of the desire to know all and conquer. But Jeong’s DIY robotics turns away from the colonial archival fever, moving through a relational, animistic mode of creation.
The title marks a significant departure from Jeong’s earlier shows, which featured her DIY robots(1). “Toys, Selected” suggests not only a passive state but also an active gesture of choosing—a deliberate act full of intentions, logic, hierarchy, and authorship, a trait exclusive to humanity. Initiated with Private Collection, her 2016 Hermès Foundation Missulsang exhibition, this gesture of displaying an encyclopedic array of the artist’s accumulations has continued across several iterations, including her work Removed Parts: Restored (2025) concurrently on view at MoMA PS1(2).
In the age of big tech moguls, where AI powered by large language models (LLMs) and speculative futures of AGI and ASI threaten that they will “fix the world’s problems and level up humanity”(3), Geumhyung Jeong turns to the rudimentary technologies of DIY robots. These ‘bodies,’ as she also calls them, cannot think, talk, or walk. Beautiful and jarring in their meticulousness, they can only move as instructed, controlled by the joystick controller. Far from Mary Shelley’s human-like monster, they bear only the faintest traces of human movement: a back-and-forth rolling more reminiscent of toy cars and a rotational feature that cannot even support its own head, letting it falter beneath the table. What unsettles us here is not the mimicry of human form, but the gap itself: an obedience stripped of consciousness. Where, then, does this sense of the uncanny arise from?
I attended her performance on May 24, 2025—the second of two iterations planned at Canal Projects. Over the course of an hour, the artist and choreographer, known for her intimate caresses with her toys, often naked, was the opposite. This performance was composed largely of language: she recited her notes and outlined significant timelines, tracing how her desires emerged and took form across nearly a decade. Her research is public and personal (4); the effect was both arresting and eerie. I found her performance echoing the lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot, the 19th-century neurologist precursor to psychoanalysis, particularly on mobility treatment of male hystero-traumatic patients suffering from monoplegia, a paralysis affecting a single limb. Whether the French neurologist’s ambiguous relationship with his female patients warrants a separate feminist critique, Jeong’s performance and Charcot’s lectures, despite contrasting attitudes—self-aggrandizement and careful and deadpan—share a clinical approach to make immobile body parts move. Of course, there is a fundamental difference in their subjects: Charcot’s were temporarily paralyzed by trauma, whereas Jeong’s were inanimate to begin with.
Jeong’s modifications to her mannequin collections, while anthropomorphic, are brutally grotesque: jaws elongated to hold wheels, heads dangling beneath tables, limbs truncated and splayed. What preoccupies her are precisely those qualities that distinguish humans from other species. Upright walking and the ability to think and speak are often cited as defining human features. In Jeong’s “bodies,” however, these are deliberately removed. This effacement feels profoundly abject, especially when the remote-controlled forms hover the threshold between creation and dismantling, the two folding into each other. The brutality of these alterations recalls Francis Bacon’s studies on the human head, notably Head VI. A work for which Bacon was accused by his contemporaries of rendering the human to abject physical reality, profane, shredded, retaining human likeness yet on the brink of collapse (6). This uneasy hybridity also resonates with Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. Both a feeling and a concept, the abject arises when the boundaries of identity and order collapse, in her words, “what disturbs identity, system, (and) order” (7). The breakdown of meaning and the collapse of boundaries between subject and object, self and other, is perceived as a threat to one’s existence, tied to desires that unsettle bodily integrity and ideals of purity.
Unlike other artists’ works resembling humanoids, such as those of Ivana Bašić or Byungjun Kwon, Jeong’s creations insist on material friction. After the performance, her DIY robots gave off a smell, resulting from the repeated friction of mechanical parts, not as pungent as a factory but still unmistakable. The scent took me back to the Korean transdisciplinary artist and researcher Byungjoon Kwon’s 2019 performance at Alternative Space LOOP’s basement, when he showcased preliminary models of his human-mimicking robots ‘dancing’ along Seoul’s indie club music scene. The exhibition was framed as an artistic critique of the Korean government's blind devotion to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, announced by the 2016 World Economic Forum (8).
Jeong’s “bodies,” by contrast, pose no threat. Underpinned by Jeong’s attitude, engaged yet autonomous, she controls and plays with her robots—play as the ultimate form of entertainment, where even the loss of control becomes another kind of play. If there is similarity between trauma and AI training, they are both structured by repetition, opacity, and deferral of one’s agency. Jeong’s Toys, Selected insists on dependency, boredom, and the messiness of relational time. Instead of being subsumed in the global myth of AI posing a threat to human autonomy and replacement, Jeong poses a more difficult question: how do we live with that which does not respond, or cannot reciprocate?
At a moment of ecological, political, and existential crisis when the human is increasingly abstracted into data, Jeong brings us back to the gritty details of embodiment. There is no transcendence here, no techno-utopia, but only wires, friction, and the stubborn labor of maintenance. ‘I had a lot of fun, but not enough. … I will play with them again’(9), she remarked, unsatisfied, yet looking ahead. In that persistence lies a quiet resistance to capitalist productivity. Maintaining and repeating, what scholar Lisa Baraitser calls “form(s) of suspended time,” through its suspension, allows the renewal of everyday life” (10).
Toys, Selected reopens on September 19, 2025, and will be on view until November 22, 2025.
About the author: Jiwon Geum is a curator and writer from Seoul, currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Footnotes:
(1) Homemade RC Toy (2019), Upgrade in Progress (2020), Under Maintenance (2021), Toy Prototype (2021), and Under Construction (2024) all describe the toy itself or the state it is in.
(2) Geumhyung Jeong. Removed Parts: Restored. 2025. Mixed media. On view in The Gatherers, MoMA PS1 from April 24 through October 6, 2025.
(3) Will Douglas Heaven, “What Is AI?,” MIT Technology Review, July 10, 2024.
(4) Attendance was highly limited, video recordings were prohibited, and Jeong’s official documentation has been kept discreet.
(5) Jean-Martin Charcot, Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, ed. Ruth Harris (London: Routledge, 1991).
(6) Francis Bacon, exhibition catalog. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum; New York/London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), Hirshhorn (Oct 12, 1989–Jan 7, 1990); LACMA (Feb 5–Apr 22, 1990); MoMA New York (May 24–Aug 28, 1990).
(7) Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
(8) Exhibition text of Byungjun Kwon Solo Exhibition: Club Golden Flower, written by Ji Yoon Yang. Organized by Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, South Korea. December 21, 2018–January 27, 2019.
(9) Remarks approximated from my notes made during the performance on May 24, 2025 at Canal Projects.
(10) Lisa Baraitser, Enduring Time (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Note on the images:
Geumhyung Jeong, Toys, Selected, Installation view, Canal Projects, 2025. Courtesy of Canal Projects. Photo by Izzy Leung
Geumhyung Jeong, Toys, Selected, Installation view (detail), Canal Projects, 2025. Courtesy of Canal Projects. Photo by Izzy Leung
Geumhyung Jeong, Toys, Selected, Installation view (detail), Canal Projects, 2025. Courtesy of Canal Projects. Photo by Izzy Leung
Photo by the author after the performance on May 24, 2025.
Geumhyung Jeong, Toys, Selected, Installation view, Canal Projects, 2025. Courtesy of Canal Projects. Photo by Izzy Leung.