The Showroom presents a newly commissioned film and sculpture-based installation by Korean artist Sojung Jun, her first solo exhibition in a UK institution. The work invokes the East Asian mythic figure of the Nine-Tailed Fox (gumiho) to explore nomadic identities of transformation and metamorphosis, while drawing on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed to consider the seed – carried by wind, animals, or water – as a sign of survival and return amid planetary breakdown.

Following the narratives of Koreans forcibly relocated to Central Asia in the Soviet era, the work centres on the Koryo-saram community in Kazakhstan, specifically the Koryo Theatre in Almaty. Stories of multi-species migration, displacement and transnational intersectionality are bound with the idea of movement - shifting between geographies and temporalities, tradition and modernity; transcending the boundaries of time and space. With the theatre’s women artists, tracking its sonic legacies, the film proceeds as a no-cut flow of AI-generated transitions, appropriating the gumiho as an apparatus of metamorphosis, branching, and polyvocality, braiding archaeology with speculative imagination.

The installation features a number of inflatable sculptures, a motif in the artist’s work, which embodies the nomadic identity: low-cost, portable, adaptable, and itinerant. In the gallery space, a single-channel video is contained within an inflatable structure that functions as both refugia and theatre, alongside other inflatable elements assembled as repositories for a seed vault and digital sculptural forms conjured through augmented reality, converging ecology with technology.

The commission expands beyond gallery borders into neighbouring sites, through a series of encounters with local groups, situating the project temporarily within The Showroom’s wider locale, before ultimately disentangling, packing up and moving on at the end of the exhibition.

Film running time: 38m 40s

As part of the project Sojung Jun is taking part in Performa in New York on Sunday 16 November.

Her performance takes the shape of an opera in nine nonlinear chapters, set in a speculative future of 2075. Guided by a ‘sound archaeologist’ who excavates and reassembles lost voices and times, the work is animated by nine musicians – pansori singer, soprano, saenghwang, North Korean gayageum, theremin, cello, percussion, dombra, and conductor – who together weave an improvised soundscape. While the performance is anchored in the Korean narrative form of pansori, which entwines song, speech, and percussion, Jun extends its sonic texture with instruments that move across and beyond Korean heritage.

The soundscape will interplay with Jun’s film I Do Nine-Tailed Fox which deploys AI to intervene in every scenic transition. These transitions, like the tricks of the shape-shifting nine-tailed fox, flow across time while drawing on a vast range of cinematic techniques. What emerges from these shifting passages is not simply the reverb of recycled images, but the possibility of untold stories that persist in the gaps of history and migration.

For more details of the performance and to book tickets go to Performa’s website here

Watch now: Sojung Jun in conversation with Valentina Umansky

About the artist

Sojung Jun is a Seoul-based artist whose practice revolves around video installations, writing, and sound to create non-linear time and space that evoke new perception of history and the present. Her work mediates voices, landscapes, and temporalities that have been pushed to the periphery amid modernity, engaging multiple sensory experiences as a method of speculation and expression. In particular, Jun’s practice explores transnational identity, focusing on the destinies of multi-species communities and tracing their connections and the patches where their lives become entangled.

She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (2025), Arko Art Center (2025), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (2023), Leeum Museum of Art (2022), National Museum of Art Osaka(2022), Kunstmuseum Bern (2021), Nam June Paik Art Center (2021), Atelier Hermès (2020), Seoul Museum of Art (2020), Palais de Tokyo (2017), Villa Vassilieff Paris (2017), and the Gwangju Biennale (2016). She has been awarded the Hermès Foundation Art Prize and the Noon Visual Award at the Gwangju Biennale.