About Our Kitsune

Files uploaded to the digital cloud can carry more than just ones and zeros. What if everyone's interaction with the internet captured a bit of their beliefs, a trace of their culture, and a part of their soul? The “cloud” becomes a digital heaven; a compendium of humanity.

Dawn spent several years living in rural Hida Takayama, Japan and learned many local legends. Snow’s Vietnamese heritage has inspired her to explore the spiritual beliefs of her mother’s culture. They were fascinated that the fox spirit folk tale is ubiquitous across Japan, Vietnam, China, and Korea. Together, Dawn and Snow question the possibility that our collective memory, history, and stories only remain in the far future as digital uploads in the cloud.

Dawn and Snow’s material choices of latex and acrylic push the bounds of traditional fabrics with inflatable air chambers and bubbles that seem to float over the body. The reinterpretation of the ancient Kitsune folk tale takes advantage of these materials and transforms the nine tailed fox into a futuristic creature. Symbology was created for Kitsune, Dawn, and Snow and are intermingled with the floating bubbles. To create the illusion of the bubbles, gold acrylic was laser cut and thermoformed into hexagonal domes and then linked into small sections. Steel standoffs are mounted under key mounting bubbles and then bonded to the latex. The aesthetic of origami and traditional papercraft was referenced when developing the faceted design of the mask, tail tips, and claws.

The Kitsune folk tale of the one thousand year old fox ascending to heaven is an allegory of the physical change of humans. Like the Kitsune, the collective beliefs of humanity survives beyond death and the passage of time. Humans have changed tremendously in just a thousand years. What will we be in another thousand years? Will we become just another folk tale?