The writings of eco-feminist poet and archaeologist Heo Su-kyung continue to haunt the scene of the present like a residue from an epoch we pretend we have already left behind. In her At the Station of the Ice Age, time does not progress; it congeals. Past and future cohabit a station “forgotten by all,” where an “unbelievable handshake” takes place in a snowstorm, a gesture between beings who share no common chronology but are forced into relation nonetheless. It is from this glacial simultaneity that artist Sojung Jun’s I Do Nine-Tailed Fox emerges. Heo’s refusal of linearity becomes not simply a thematic reference but a methodological aperture through which Jun thinks sound, mythmaking, diaspora, and survival.

What, then, is the “artistic” for Jun? It is not a medium, nor even a set of mediums, but a mode of vibration, an onto-aesthetic ecology in which performance becomes a regenerative field continually reorganizing itself. Sonic practice is never mere soundtracking; it is an insurgent presence, thick with the memory of peoples and climates, dense with dissent, and charged with the potentia of metamorphosis. I Do Nine-Tailed Fox gathers these forces into a nonlinear operatic form, refusing the demand that stories move forward when history itself has not.

Fig. 1. Sojung JUN. I Do Nine-Tailed Fox, 2025. Photo  by Masao Katagami. Image courtesy of Asia Society

At the center of Jun’s inquiry is the gumiho, the nine-tailed fox of East Asian lore, a figure long positioned as trickster, threat, or feminine excess. Jun approaches the fox not as an object of folklore but as a geontological operator. The gumiho becomes a model for inhabiting zones of abandonment, sites where life and nonlife, human and nonhuman, self and state, meet in unstable arrangements. Cast as unruly and deceptive by dominant narratives, the fox instead reveals a grammar of endurance: adaptation, liquidity, the right to shift form when the world demands it. Its multiple identities echo the experiences of ethnic Korean diasporic communities who survived colonial occupation, repeated displacements, and the grinding forces of Soviet and post-Soviet governance.  

Jun’s fascination with Near Eastern civilizations and Silk Road itineraries leads her to reframe the history of the Koryo-saram, ethnic Koreans deported by Stalin in 1937 from the Soviet Far East to Central Asia, a paradigmatic moment of late-imperial ethnic cleansing. And yet, despite the state’s attempt to erase them, Koryo-saram cultural forms persisted. The Koryo Theater, founded in Vladivostok in 1932 and later relocated to Almaty, Kazakhstan, remains a living archive of this survival, a site where performance becomes a shelter, a spacetime in which memory can recombine rather than calcify. Here, Jun encounters a community whose cultural tenacity refuses the logics of disappearance that empire attempts to impose.

The analogy becomes clear: like the nine-tailed fox, the Koryo-saram lived by continual reconfiguration, an ethics of refashioning oneself to persist across ruptured ideologies, climates, and geopolitical grids. Working with generations of Koryo Theater artists—Kim Rimma, Pen Ekaterina, Yugay Angelina—Jun foregrounds a matrilineal current of transmission. Their presence becomes connective tissue binding ancestral histories to speculative futures, lived experiences to fabulated ones.

Fig. 3. Sojung JUN. I Do Nine-Tailed Fox, 2025. Photo  by Masao Katagami. Image courtesy of Asia Society

Jun’s project took shape during Korea’s recent wildfires and political unrest, conditions in which reality itself felt nonlinear, unreliable, fragmented. Myths were not escapes but alternative infrastructures for metabolizing the present. The nine-tailed fox, long accused of deception, reappears as a figure for surviving in zones where stability is a trap, not a guarantee. As Jun insists, splitting and scattering are forms of persistence. Instability is a generative condition of existence.

Performa’s collaboration catalyzed this transformation. Known for insisting on performance as a critical force, Performa offered Jun a framework capable of housing her multisensory practice—video, music, storytelling. The intensity of the process reshaped the work and marked a turning point in her trajectory.

I Do Nine-Tailed Fox draws us into the layered time of Eurasia, Ice Age sediments, Soviet rail lines, nomadic routes, women’s speculative writings, the migrations of people and seeds. The nine-tailed fox travels across these terrains not as symbol but as witness, as agent in a dense network of relational obligations. Through sound, myth, archive, and performance, Jun proposes that shapeshifting is not a fantasy but a political practice of survival, a mode of continual world-making.

The work itself was produced through intuition, collective labor, and transnational alliances in Kazakhstan and at Asia Society in New York built with minimal material resources but maximal imagination. The New York concert became a demonstration of how worlds are made, not by capital, but by the stubborn creativity of communities refusing erasure.

Jun invites us into a spacetime of overlapping epochs, improbable encounters, and supportive handshakes across glacial durations. In the turbulence of the present, the nine-tailed fox offers a lesson central to our geontological condition: transformation is not leaving the world but remaking it otherwise.