Jeong comes to contemporary art from an unusual background in puppetry, animation, acting and dance. As such, her approach to subject-object relations is expansive, shaped by the particular attitudes of these disciplines. She has amassed an extensive personal collection of things—mannequins, prosthetics, sex toys, domestic gadgets, beauty tools and fitness equipment—with which she physically interacts. She classifies these objects as either 'performed' or 'unperformed', depending on whether they have yet featured in her work. In 7ways (2008), for instance, she used the suction of an industrial vacuum cleaner to affix the mouth of a grey-haired mask to her flesh in a performative ‘duet’. The act was reversed in CPR Practice (2013), where she tried to breathe life into an unresponsive dummy. Spa & Beauty (2017) saw Jeong demonstrate atypical uses of beauty products and tools to make their intended functions strange. More recently, the artist has engineered her own machines—hybrid forms assembled from DC motors, aluminium profiles, joysticks and medical mannequin parts—that bridge the distance between subject and object that remained in her preceding work. Jeong is herself conscious of this move:

I didn’t plan it this way from the beginning, but it feels like there is a story that continues from my earliest to my most recent works, between real bodies/fake bodies/objects/machines/devices. The story is of a person who repeatedly tried to be friends with many different things, from household devices to mannequins, buying more advanced and expensive ones. Then, finally and slowly, she started to construct a machine in the form of a body by herself. This progression, in a way, also seems to follow the advancement of our current hyper technoculture; year after year, distinctions between the human and the technological other are getting ever more thin…³

How might we understand Jeong’s practice if not through a humanist framework? Over the past three decades, new materialism or the ‘turn to matter’ has attempted to carry out this work. In broad terms, the movement rejects anthropocentrism and nature-culture dualism, attending to the vitality and liveness of non- or more-than- human actors. It provides a different language to talk about interactions between and among things. Donna Haraway gave us her genderless fusion of animal and machine in the cyborg;⁴ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,⁵ Manuel DeLanda,⁶ Bruno Latour⁷ and Michel Callon⁸ their conceptions of messy togetherness in assemblage theory; and Karen Barad a radical approach to causality in ‘agential realism’.⁹ These theorists comprehend the world in a constant state of flux, recognise multiplicity and contingency and assign agency to forms of being (organic and inorganic) previously understood as inert or subordinate to humans. Such orientations are only becoming more relevant as the fields of artificial intelligence and the biological sciences increasingly intertwine.

And what does it look like when we apply this thinking to Jeong’s work? This is the task I set myself attending the artist’s lecture-performance, Oil Pressure Vibrator (2008), programmed as part of this year’s RISING Festival, Melbourne.¹⁰ Presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), the audience filed into the theatre while Jeong sat silent at her laptop, sternly surveying the assembling crowd. The staging was simple, arranged as one would expect of a lecture, save for a hardhat placed benignly atop the artist’s desk, under which a small toy excavator was hidden. Oil Pressure Vibrator plays out as a kind of narrativised tracing of Jeong’s practice, framing her performance history as a series of misguided attempts at locating the ideal sexual partner. Jeong, or more accurately, her fictionalised persona, takes us through a chain of romantic companions—mechanical devices and commonplace objects—via snippets from her previous performances played onscreen. Throughout, Jeong’s affect is flat and expressionless, lending a wry irony to the retelling. We realise we shouldn’t take the artist’s quest all too seriously; Jeong is distancing herself from levying any humanistic gravity upon the story.

None of the partners fully satiate her desire, and she laments the decreasing intensity of her orgasms, receiving an awkward chuckle from the audience. At one point, she falters, ‘cheating’ on her machines with a flesh-and-bone man. When a peer criticises her passivity in these affairs, Jeong arrives at the realisation that she must ‘divide herself in two’, becoming a ‘hermaphrodite’ to reach her own sexual independence. She needs to occupy both active and passive, giver and receiver, within herself. It is at this juncture that she chances upon a hydraulic excavator at a construction site. She marvels at its impressive strength and virility as it penetrates the earth. It possesses the ‘long neck and flexible joints’ she most favours in a romantic partner. Its sharply pointed breaker attachment is especially arousing. Jeong’s character is captivated, too, by its mechanical functioning, specifically the circulatory oil pressure system animating the excavator. To get closer to it, she embarks on a rigorous training course to obtain an operating license.

The lecture-performance culminates in a ceremonial act of sexual gratification that takes place on a beach. At the water’s edge, Jeong, expertly manoeuvring the machine, approaches a sand sculpture version of herself in the throes of pleasure. Gradually, she brings the robotic arm down upon the form, destroying the bodily integrity of her stand-in. Simultaneously, the ‘real’ Jeong lies on stage, stroking herself tenderly with the miniature excavator. In this strange masturbatory rite, she has achieved her objective of autoerotic satisfaction.

Oil Pressure Vibrator seeks to move beyond binary concepts, to embrace continuity with our technologised world, even in the most intimate realms of our lives. The artist does so, however, using the humanist’s tools. Division is still uncomfortably present in Jeong’s work. Throughout the performance, her efforts at sexual freedom remain bound by oppositional concepts. She flits between dichotomised roles: subject-object, phallus and vessel, dominant and submissive, without managing to collapse these distinctions. The final ritual, too, sees Jeong’s persona doubled, proxied, rather than entwined with the machinic. This is not a criticism per se, but an acknowledgment of the challenges faced in heeding the call of the new materialists. Undoing inherited assumptions is no easy task. Works like Oil Pressure Vibrator are a kind of stepping stone en route to grasping the uninterrupted flow between the human and more-than-human. We should remember that Oil Pressure Vibrator was first staged in 2008; eons ago in terms of recent advancements in AI and biotechnology. If artists are to keep step, they will need to overcome divisive thinking and welcome flux, multiplicity and interconnectedness.