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Inspired by the writing of the late eco-feminist poet and archaeologist Heo Soo-kyung and the shape-shifting mythical nine-tailed fox, Seoul-based artist Sojung Jun turns to the history of the Koryo-saram—ethnic Koreans forcibly deported in 1937 from the Soviet Far East to Central Asia under Joseph Stalin. Despite this act of ethnic cleansing, Koryo-saram cultural life endured. Among its most significant institutions to survive was the Koryo Theater, founded in 1932 in Vladivostok as the first Korean-language theater in the Soviet Union. When the Koryo-saram were expelled, the theater moved with them, reestablishing itself in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where it remains active today—a vital site of Korean cultural and artistic expression. More than an institution, Koryo Theater is a living archive of survival and transformation, a structure that withstood the empire that sought its erasure.

In I Do Nine-Tailed Fox, Jun’s Performa Project premiering at Asia Society, she parallels the legacy of the Koryo Theater with the East Asian folklore of the nine-tailed fox or gumiho. Often cast as a trickster or threat, the nine-tailed fox also embodies adaptability and resilience—qualities that echo the histories of the Koryo-saram. Like the theater and the community that carried it through exile, the gumiho resists disappearance by shifting form, traversing boundaries of time, geography, and identity.

Jun adopts the operatic form as a structure of nine nonlinear chapters set in the year 2075, a far-distant date that situates the work within a realm of speculative fabulation. Led by a “sound archaeologist” who excavates and reassembles lost voices and times, the opera is animated by nine musicians—pansori singer, soprano, saenghwang, North Korean gayageum, theremin, cello, percussion, dombra, and conductor—building an improvised and layered soundscape. While the performance is anchored in the Korean narrative music form of pansori, which entwines song, speech, and percussion, Jun expands the sonic field beyond tradition to include instruments across and beyond Korean heritage.

The musical dialogue between the ancestral and the experimental extends into a newly commissioned video that foregrounds the legacy of women artists at the Koryo Theater, represented through Yugay Angelina, Junghee Oh, and Jinwon Park. Their images stand in for the matrilineal traditions of scattered Koryo-saram communities, carried across generations and geographies. In the film, every transition is given over to artificial intelligence—not to fabricate new images ex nihilo, but to dwell in the jump cuts, the interstitial spaces of history and migration. Jun places the Koryo Theater’s archive in porous relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s Dutch tilts and Hong Sang-soo’s abrupt close-ups, opening a speculative relay across time. What emerges in these shifting passages is not simply a reverb of bygone images but the possibility of untold stories that find life in the gaps.

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