Geumhyung Jeong:
Oil Pressure Vibrator

Shovel Love: Observations on Oil Pressure Vibrator

An Essay by Scott T. Cummings

From a puckish perspective, Geumhyung Jeong’s Oil Pressure Vibrator can be seen as a version of Beauty and the Beast. Jeong, a Korean performance artist, is the beauty, and the beast is a massive ten-ton hydraulic pile driver more at home on a construction site than in a fairy tale. In this instance, though, it is Beauty who desires the Beast and undertakes a heroic effort to win its ungendered mechanical heart. 

The performance, which is more a lecture-presentation than a show, takes place on the large open mainstage of the Chopin Theatre. As the audience files in, there is a red worker’s hardhat on the bare floor center stage. Geumhyung Jeong sits still and erect at a work table upstage right, with her laptop in front of her and a microphone stand at her side. She scrutinizes the crowd in a manner that is neutral, passive, even a bit removed, and she maintains this affect throughout the sixty-minute performance. For most of that time, she stays at the table, relatively still, and uses her laptop to show more than a dozen video clips on a large projection screen hanging ten feet off the floor all the way upstage. These videos illustrate a personal journey around sex and sexuality and machines that she describes in a matter-of-fact, almost flat voice. Speaking in Korean, her words are shown in English on the screen beneath the videos. 

“At 27, I made a decision to become a hermaphrodite,” she says early on. “Since then I haven’t had sex with men.” Or women, it seems. The effort to split herself into male and female and transcend the gender binary led her to experimental interactions with objects and mechanical devices in dance studios, gallery spaces, and rehearsal rooms. She shows a clip from an early performance in which she lies on the floor beneath an ocean-blue cloth and a model ship slowly rises and falls as it sails the contours of her body. A featureless white head from a mannequin or medical dummy appears in several excerpted performances. When autoerotic stimulation from an electric toothbrush loses its edge, she tries sex with a vacuum cleaner in the evolving quest she calls “the orgasm unto death project.” 

And “then one day,” as a video shows us, Jeong spots a mammoth hydraulic shovel at a noisy big-city construction site, and it is lust at first sight. “Can I have a try?” she asks one of the befuddled workers, which leads to videos that document her effort to learn the equipment, pass the requisite tests, and in essence transform herself into a massive excavating machine. This process paves the way for a climactic final video sequence on a beach in which an excavator-cum-Jeong slowly approaches a sprawling mound of sand shaped as a large naked woman lying on her back and penetrates it again and again with its decidedly phallic pile-driving extension. Without underscoring or comment, the presentation is more dispassionate than pornographic; it is slow, documentary, neither violent or erotic. Nevertheless, in the end, it would seem that the orgasm beyond death has been achieved.  

All of this might be laugh-out-loud funny if it were not presented from start to finish with an arthouse seriousness that points to Jeong’s broader mission. Yes, there is a lurking irony here, but her performance is no joke. Since the first iterations of Oil Pressure Vibrator (2008) and 7ways (2009)—seen at the second-ever Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in 2017—she has been widely celebrated for her provocative exploration of the relationship between human bodies and machine bodies, carving out an unusual artistic territory that combines choreography, installation art, object theater, and DIY robotics. Her work has been supported by Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and the Fund for Korean Art Abroad and showcased at festivals and exhibitions around the world, including the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Chicago festival.  

And context makes a difference. In theatrical terms, the most dramatic thing that happens in Oil Pressure Vibrator is that Jeong stands up. After sitting at her laptop for half an hour, she rises, walks to the red construction helmet centerstage, and lifts it to reveal a plastic toy steam shovel underneath. In a gesture that anticipates the final climax on the beach, she lies back on the floor and slowly moves the toy over her entire body, including her genitals, in a vaguely sensual way. “He runs by oil pressure,” she narrates in a tone that is more clinical than sensual before returning to her table and clicking on the next video. As cerebral as it was, the palpable physicality of this brief action underscored just how remote and flat and mediated Oil Pressure Vibrator felt as a whole. Our experience was dominated by listening to Jeong’s straightforward verbal account and watching archival or documentary film clips that were akin to professional home movies. As theater, there was an absence of presence, a lack of immediacy that was all the more conspicuous in the larger context of an international puppet theater festival filled with performing objects manipulated by animated human beings. As vivid as it was, the brief use of the plastic toy shovel felt more perfunctory than profound, less a leap into a theatrical here-and-now and more a souvenir of an artistic journey that took place at another place and another time.  

And maybe the presentation of Oil Pressure Vibrator in 2026 is itself something of a souvenir. Jeong first performed the piece in Korea in 2008 at the very start of a career that in recent years suggests her performances are more at home in a gallery than on a stage. The piece stands—especially for followers of her work—as a kind of origin story, a prologue or point of departure for a long-term exploration of the human and the machine. But by itself, at least in the form displayed in Chicago, it was aloof and unengaging.