Julia Yintong Fung/ Book Edition

Julia Fung is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across mixed-media installation, sound, and the moving image. Their practice explores human relationships with the cosmos and the natural environment, investigating the dimensions of planetary deep time in relation to materiality and the body. Fung also crafts immersive, theatrical environments that interrogate technology-driven identities and our specific locality on Earth within the vastness of the universe.

Driven by the concept of “myth-science” as a fictioning process, Fung utilizes the transitional qualities of liquid materials—such as wax, metal, and glass—alongside playful elements like inflatables to capture the elemental shifts of the natural world. Their practice maps how cosmic rhythms regulate human biology and agricultural labor, offering a critical genealogy of “chronopolitics” to challenge how standardized, colonial time has historically mandated environmental extraction. By transforming existing spaces through unsettling soundscapes and architectural shifts, Fung disorients the audience’s ordinary sensory routines, inviting them into a pluralistic, multidimensional experience of time that fosters alternative futures for our relationship with the Earth.

Geotrauma is the Trauma of Time

Cowhide, horse reins, aluminium, glass, ceramic, lighting board,

Various dimensions, 2026

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake served as a pivotal rupture, destabilising the Western episteme of natural history. To mitigate the terror promoted by these unknown tremors, Enlightenment thinkers replaced divine causality with the concept of Reason, re-perceiving Earth as a volatile planet without God. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant analysed the seismic and earth origination through the lens of an "Overseer". This perspective established a detached geologic gaze that facilitated the exploitation of land, race, and social relations. By securing the observer as an adjudicator of the knowledge of earth, this framework effectively elevates whiteness to a geologic superpower position, occupying the vacuum left by the transcendental godhood of the past. By coalescing metaphysical and geophysical orders, Kant provided a means to narrativize tectonic instability in time, and whereby to exorcise the excesses of inhuman alterity. The inhuman here, refered to unregulated forms of existence — those irreducible difference of being against the reduction of possibility — configured simultaneously as both race and geology. The colonial impulse to categorize, extract and occupy the Earth through racial schemas can be traced back to a primal dread—the terror of a wild, catastrophic, and inhospitable planet. Kathryn Yusoff argued that this internal fear functions as a compensatory mechanism: the geologic instability that humans cannot control was projected outward, manifesting as a systematic violence inflicted upon specific racialized bodies. In this sense, the fault line of colonial articulation was built upon the transformation of existential terror into externalized subjugation, it marked the fear for an inhuman planet, and highlighted the weight of influence of geomateriality in colonial model of thought and subjectivity. Enlightenment Metaphysics was launched as a conceptual cover for the colonial geophysics of power, instrumentalizing the Black, Indigenous, Brown, and Pan-Asian bodies that violently structure the material world to achieve the realization of those geographic imaginaries. Colonialism, hence, functioned as an extreme form of materialism that transforming Earth into a new Earth, subtracting of the geo (Extractive economy), which conditioned our displacement of land which then broke worlds through ripping the continuity of time to reshape our understanding of planetary time-space. The fear for the inhuman was also the fear for multiplicitous nature of time and space embedded in the resistant earth and unregulated, undisciplined ecology. This crisis of linearity was merely a modern creation, a construct that dictates the Western understanding of being and time. This unidirectional narrative remains profoundly problematic, as engagement with the past is restricted to the mediation of institutionalized collective memory. Within this framework, history is reduced to curated moments of historical transformation that effectively estranged any immediate access to an originary identity, weakening the inherent multiplicity of existence -- human bodies are fundamentally mineralogical and tethered to the physical forces of the Earth Audio