Yang Jung-uk’s work is about storytelling that starts with people. His devices, made of wood and motors, convey stories through the space they occupy, their movements, and the sounds they make. Yang’s work represents a body, and the body that occupies an exhibition space speaks through its movements. Thus, his artworks can be called “storytelling machines.” Yang’s storytelling machines, while occupying spaces, imply our body and awaken an awareness of its presence. The stories conveyed through their balanced structures and repetitive movements are less grand epics and more like small talk from everyday life, a warm gesture of comfort, or a heartfelt message that needs to be conveyed. The reason Yang chose moving machines as a medium for storytelling, as opposed to speaking or writing, is probably for the purpose of more directly communicating people’s emotions and their sense of life. Ultimately, Yang’s work does not merely show an interest in experiments dealing with mechanical aesthetics, technological media functions, or the existence of technological objects. Rather, he displays an interest in a broad intersubjectivity that encompasses not only the human subject but also the others and the environment surrounding them.

1. Storytelling Machines from Life

While considering the machinic dimension of subjectivation, the noted French psychoanalyst and philosopher Felix Guattari pointed out that in today’s world, where digital technology has become commonplace, techno-logical machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity. These machines function not only within their memory and intelligence but also within their sensibility, affects and unconscious fantasms. Attempts to redefine subjectivity may begin by emphasizing the heterogeneity of the components leading to the production of subjectivity.1 Yang’s storytelling machines emerge as an example of aesthetic machines to replace capital, information machines, and communication machines. Specifically, they create moments of rupture and changes by assigning heterogeneous layers to the various elements that produce subjectivity. Through the mobilization of all rhetoric, Yang’s storytelling machines tell stories about people in specific situations.

The purpose of storytelling in artworks is profoundly classical. Throughout the long history of art, many paintings and sculptures considered great have conveyed stories about remarkable figures, historical events, and the nature created by God—and are ultimately meant to be remembered and reflected upon for eternity. To achieve this, artists have invested in relentless training and extensive resources to embody beautiful and idealized bodies. Yang Jung-uk is no different in this regard. He also dedicates meticulous effort and time to his storytelling. However, the stories produced and conveyed by his works are drawn from observations and imaginations about the everyday people he encounters and the subtle experiences of his surroundings. Consequently, his works are a form of storytelling that begin with people and can be considered as a kind of portrait-making.

Yang’s storytelling begins with observations about others and reflections on daily life, including his own actions and words. He describes what drives and guides this process as a “soft heart” toward his subjects. His works portray subjects such as random people he meets from specific professions, family members with whom he shares intimate relationships, and the true selves of all these people, which he then uncovers when looking back on them, along with parts of his resonating heart from those moments. Not only does Yang exhibit a tender care toward these subjects, but he also employs his vivid imagination to craft stories about them. Indeed, his works produce stories by adhering to the conventions of formative symbols instead of following the structure of linguistic symbols.

For his art, he employs moving devices using wood and motors. Years ago, the genesis of such works was an automaton created as a small gift that evoked emotion. Later, he created a mechanical device through careful observation of the movement of bodies—human or nonhuman—with the aim of capturing even the movement of the mind that arose from it. The following artworks were titled in a way that allowed the viewer to infer both a character and the situation they were in: Adversity Whispers That There Is Hope (2011), Three Workmen I Came to Know Only in the Evening (2013), the ‘Standing Workers’ series (2015, 2022), Massage Machines Don’t Know What Your Loved One’s Shoulders Are Like (2015), and He Explained for a Long Time Over a Corded Telephone with a Long Cord (2016). Furthermore, the themes of his works gradually expanded from the observer’s position to the positions and exchanges within interactive relationships, as seen in the ‘Scenery of Dialogue’ series (2018–2019), You Said to the Side, and I Said to the Left (2021), and We Hugged Yesterday Tightly, Sat Cramped Up, and Looked in a Familiar Direction (2022). A more recent work, Someone I Know, in His Garden I’ve Never Seen (2024), conveys a story about a person through the landscape he created.

The technology used in Yang’s works is minimal—just enough to realize his ideas—yet still manages to preserve “humane time” and allow the energy of love to gather. He describes the technology he uses as the bare minimum, essentially a tool acquired through lived experience, and the machines moved by this technology are what he calls “machines of sincerity.” Rather than creating automated machines that no longer require any human touch, he creates machines that need human care and retain a sense of warmth.

Yang’s storytelling machines disappear after being installed once. If a piece does not find a place to be housed or a collector after its initial installation, it is disassembled, so it continues to exist only in the artist’s mind. The physical structure of the work is not stored or preserved to be exhibited again in the same form. Instead, Yang relies on his memory to recreate it. Since there is no detailed, standardized blueprint that someone else could use to replicate his work, only the artist himself can recreate it. This situation is akin to a storyteller narrating a story and then repeating it in a different version. The landscapes of the arduous lives of myriad professionals in industrial society, as well as the scenes of deeply personal experiences, are captured through momentary intuition and unfold as stories that transform into encounters between bodies in continuous time through the movement of spatial devices.

2. Moving Machines, Speaking Bodies

Yang Jung-uk’s works begin with movement recalled from memories of observation. By materializing the image of a character into a moving device, the artwork transforms into a body that moves and speaks to the viewer. The corporeality of this device exists as a distinct physical presence in the exhibition space, connecting with a situation that is perceived simultaneously through sight and touch. The world we habitually perceive through our bodies forms our phenomenological presence. At this moment, the physical space, the concrete objects within it, and the subject experiencing those objects become crucial elements of the work. This explains why Yang, who began his artistic journey through painting, has moved beyond the flat surface to create three-dimensional works. From a single observation, he imagines the image of an object and brings it into reality through movement.

While many of the machines we encounter today function as mysterious black boxes, with their inner workings hidden, the machines Yang creates openly reveal their dynamic structures, showcasing the mechanism that drive them. The process through which Yang’s storytelling machines are organized is closely related to their materiality. In other words, the materiality of the machines is directly connected to the production of stories. What connects the materiality of the machines and the stories is the flow of sensation and affects. Each one of his machines is placed as a solid object in a real space. Its parts are connected through physical exchanges of forces, while the mutual conversions between rotary and linear motions express particular bodily movement. Horizontal, vertical, and circular substructures with motors are connected to a whole wooden frame by wooden joints, bearings, and strings, all of them moving in repetitive cycles of relaxation and tension. Lamps and other materials attached in various spots mediate the flow of movement and respond to the intensity of energy.

As such, Yang’s machines convey stories through visual, tactile, and auditory elements. The artist profoundly contemplates a single object of observation, but in the actual artwork, he incorporates non-conceptual elements. The forms and structures, immediately grasped through vision, allow viewers to perceive how the work operates, and the perceived movement engages not only the eyes but also the entire body of the viewer, making the experience more tactile than purely visual. Yang Jung-uk’s machines mimic bones, ligaments, muscles, and a number of sensory organs, stimulating a range of senses simultaneously through the movement of motors, sounds, and vibrations. The reason Yang originally chose wood as his primary material is that it is a material that invites the act of touching. He creates his own imaginative world and objects by engaging with the state of things as sensed by the hand, the space around us as perceived through the body, and the information received through hearing. A person and the environment in which the person stands are transformed into a mechanical structure, and in this process, the two distinguished elements become interdependent due to the dimension of alterity that Guattari describes as inherent in the operation of machines.2

The reason why Yang’s machines, despite occupying physical spaces and possessing a strong concreteness, retreat into an imaginary dimension lies in the fact that these machines are storytelling machines. They are not only mechanical devices but also abstract machines with discursive capabilities. Yang’s machines speak to us from between real and imagined spaces. In contrast to the digital devices we use daily to speak to someone, and which rely on virtual space as well as the arrangement of fragmented signals, Yang’s storytelling machines are firmly placed in actual spaces, guiding viewers into a realm of imagination. From the memory of a moment when the artist encountered another person, an icon or image emerges, which is then transformed into nuances of form and color imbued with emotion and feeling, and ultimately expressed through the structure and movement of a machine.

The light that illuminates an artwork placed on the floor, and the shadows it casts, serve as indicators of the surrounding physical space while simultaneously transforming the work into an imaginative performer. The light and shadows create a stage that facilitates the encounter between the viewer and the piece. This stage then allows the exhibited work to oscillate between two dimensions: one is the solid body of its physical presence, the other is the narrative unfolded by its “script.” In this way, the light and shadows of the real space construct an imaginary space, and the movement within the actual space slides into the realm of imagination because, in the end, the artist’s goal is to tell a story.

Yang’s storytelling machine does not present a contemplative, representational image to the viewer. Rather, it confronts the viewer with a subject that takes on the structure of a moving machine. By placing viewers in front of the vector of subjectification, it enables them to be reborn as a new subject—not through linguistic cognition but through emotional perception—within a relationship connected to others and within the presence of the world. This process aligns with what Guattari called “pathic subjectivation,”3 or the foundation of all modes of subjectivation. Thus, Yang’s machine functions not only as a physical arrangement of elements but also as an abstract machine that generates meaning through the interplay and movement of its numerous components. Furthermore, it appears as the alterity of viewers, enabling self-production through intersubjectivity.4

3. The Faceless Portraits Drawn by Storytelling Machines

The stories conveyed by Yang Jung-uk’s machines are about the reality of a subject. Earlier, we noted that Yang’s works are a form of storytelling that begin with people, rendering them a kind of portrait-making. The artist imagines the material structure and movement of his works based on his observations of the people he encounters in everyday life and the emotions they evoke. Put another way, this portrait-making does not start from the face but rather from the body—its posture, movement, tension, and relaxation. Yang’s storytelling machines convey their stories not through symbols in language or images but through a pre-signifying regime of signs, such as gestures, rhythms, noises, and light. As a result, the story transmitted by these machines are something to be experienced. And because the stories of the observed figures, the presence of the moving body, and the dimensions of imaginative expression are intertwined, Yang’s machines become something strange—neither fantastical bodies of illusion nor rational mechanical devices.

Yang’s machines form signifiance and the strata of subjectification, which Gilles Deleuze, another French philosopher, and Guattari emphasize as two distinct axes in the regime of signs. For the signifiers inscribed to construct a story, as well as for the subjectification derived from the consciousness and affects formed by the arrangement and movement of the machine’s pre-signifying elements, the artwork needs a “white wall” for inscribing signifiers and a “black hole” of subjectification for positioning consciousness, affects, and excesses. Deleuze and Guattari both mention a face that these two layers of signifiance and subjectification produce, and this is born from an abstract machine that they call the “faciality.” This abstract machine of faciality operates according to the needs of economics, collectives, and power, producing an unindividualized face. In fact, this machine creates a system of a black hole and a white wall, thereby enabling the social production of faces. However, a machine that escapes from this social production of faces produces a deterritorialized face. The deterritorialized face includes not only the eyes, nose, and mouth but also the face-like chest, hands, entire body, and even the tools themselves. By distancing itself from the signifiers that engage with the facialized body, the body can be decoded.5 With respect to Yang Jung-uk’s machines, they go beyond the deterritorialized face that Deleuze and Guattari discuss, performing a type of portrait-making through the decoding of a faceless body. Instead of creating a face by imprinting two eyes or erecting a white wall to imprint the eyes on, Yang assembles workable limbs.

The strange portraits drawn by these machines are constructed along two axes: one is the axis of signifiance through storytelling, while the other is the axis of subjectification through mechanical movement. The story transmitted by such a machine begins with a sentence presented in the title of the artwork. Each title encapsulates a scene or a moment of intuition, with the story starting in the title, such as Where Do People Go after Lunch? (2012), The Three Siblings Are on Their Way Home, But It Feels Like They Are Going to the Store (2013), Only the Turtle Does Not Know Our Weekends (2014), or Did Your Father Sleep Well All Week? (2016). From these storytelling machines, a balance is struck between reality and imagination, and from this balance emerges pathos. Yet this intensity does not stem from facial expressions but actually from the complex ritornello created by the fragmented body. Guattari’s ritornello is a repetitive continuum that crystallizes existential affects, encompassing dimensions of sound, emotion, and the face that continuously permeate one another.6 Essentially, the movement created by Yang Jung-uk’s machines is this very ritornello.

Yang Jung-uk seeks to find the tension and balance between intuition, stories, and effects as he constructs his machines from fragments of divided bodies. These machines are devices of deterritorialized faciality on a deeply personal level. They are not only arrangements of physical elements but also aesthetic machines that carry out a literary mission while offering sensory experiences at the same time. Through these machines, the artist envisions the expansion of tense relationships, along with the diversification of senses and meaning. The portrait drawn by a storytelling machine is depicted through a ritornello of decoded bodies within a single story. As such, the story, which resides in the realm of language, is brought into reality through movement within physical space. Unlike fleeting stories generated by digital devices and networks, the storytelling machine employs a story that repeats endlessly. At its core, it tells a story that begins with a single observation in motion—through an embodied repetitive structure, just like the stories that have been repeatedly told since the earliest times when human experience and memory were transmitted in words.

In this sense, Yang Jung-uk’s works can be described as faceless portraits drawn by storytelling machines. These portraits, experienced alongside the viewer, offer insights into life and humanity through intersubjectivity. They resemble the strange tremor and shock one feels when gazing at their own face in the mirror, when interacting with family members, when encountering others throughout life, or when casually reflecting on the surrounding landscape. However, instead of a chilling black hole and a white wall, Yang’s machines reveal gestures and sounds that are released upon their deconstruction. What, then, does this repetition ultimately reveal? Could it be a portrait of the human being observed through the black hole’s gaze—a glimpse of life’s truth?

1. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 4.

2. Guattari, 41–42.

3. Guattari, 26.

4. See Guattari, 34–42.

5. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 167–191.

6. Guattari, Chaosmosis, 15. Ritornello refers to a repeated section in symphonies and choral works, but it is not a simple repetition. Rather, it is a repetition accompanied by variations. Guattari calls the repetitive continuum that crystallizes existential affects “ritornello,” or “existential refrains.” For more detailed discussion of “ritornello (refrains),” see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 310-350.

References

• 올해의 작가상 (Korean Artist Prize)