The sensuality of Oil Pressure Vibrator—A curatorial statement by Joyce Rosario

December 12, 2016

Performances by Geumhyung Jeong are without artifice—and yet otherworldly.

Oil Pressure Vibrator is one of my top picks at PuSh this year. Since seeing 7 Ways this past September at the TBA Festival in Portland, I can’t wait to see more of Jeong’s work. It doesn’t translate well on video (I tried) but it’s fascinating, riveting, even humorous, but in such an unconventional way that it’s all the more compelling.

Vancouver audiences may be familiar with Jeong’s work presented at Live Biennale in 2009, a duet with a vacuum cleaner. Theron Schmidt from Australia’s Real Time magazine wrote:

Puppetry doesn’t often find a place in experimental theatre festivals, but Jeong Geumhyung’s duet with a vacuum cleaner is a reminder of how fantastical, magical and disturbing a form it can be. Jeong’s work addresses issues of control and manipulation and of animation and death—exactly the realm of puppetry.

Such wonderful descriptions as “beautifully strange” and “ostentatious simplicity” are applied to Jeong’s work. Objectively, her projects combine dance, puppetry, and bring attention to her technical mastery of theatrical conventions, including choreography and object manipulation. Her performances take place in unadorned empty space, illuminated only with plain light.

Jeong explores the human body and inanimate objects, the relationship between the body and the machine. How we as humans mediate and manipulate the world around us through tools and machines is part of what defines us. Objects have no purpose unless we use them, animate them, and yet so much of how we use these objects—and our very dependence of them—disconnect us from our humanity.

Jeong’s use of objects, her obsession with machines, especially in her lecture performance Oil Pressure Vibrator (but also in her other works) takes on sexual and erotic connotations, as well as comments on gender and power. Sensuality, connecting to the senses, is a practice of connecting the body and the object, of animating our own humanity, or at least a method of escaping the emptiness and defying the loneliness of being human.

—Joyce Rosario
Associate Curator

Winner of the 2016 Hermès Foundation Award, Geumhyung Jeong returns to Vancouver with Oil Pressure Vibrator for three nights only, January 17 to 19. Buy tickets.