Timjune Tianjun Li 李天竣


Current and Past Exhibitions

Performances
Projects


  1. Echo, Kaiku, Huisheng
    Free as Birds (2024-ongoing):

  2. Migrating (2024) 

  3. Imagine (2025)

  5. Those Who Flew Before Me (2025) 

  6. Lighthouse Polyphonic (2025)

  7. Singing Rizitika in Cloudcuckooland (2025)

    And I shall go, and the birds will continue singing (2025) hall I


  8. Today, Tomorrow, and the Tales from the Wind (2024    )

  10. Echo, Echo, Echo (2025-ongoing)
     ()     E 
  11. Breathe, and You Are Home (2026)

    i am (2026-ongoing)

    La Rotació Chorus (2025)    (() 

  2. From Aranya to Qinhuangdao (2022)  

  3. La Luna y el Hacedor (2020)  

  4. Village of Oblivion (2019)

  5. A Goat in Blue (2018)

     
Artist-in-Residence Archives

Free as Birds:
And I shall go. And the birds will continue singing (2025)
2025
4k, Single-channel video, Stereo Sounds, 3:52



The artist performs with voice, embodying history,
shifting across gender and species to trace war, labor, and migration.





The video performance, created during a residency at Konvent Art Center in Catalonia, explores the intersections of history, migration, and human–nonhuman transformation through voice. Filmed in the stairwell of the former convent and textile factory, the work unfolds as a descent through three symbolic registers: war and exile, industrial labor, and contemporary migration. Combining shifting vocal ranges that transcend genders and non-human, a handheld radio, and a silver emergency blanket, Li constructs a layered narrative that situates the body as both archive and witness.




The work unfolds in three movements, each marked by a distinct vocal register and soundscape simulated by Li's voice:

 1. War and Exile
Li begins with a low male register, accompanied by siren-like tones. The black-and-white flickering light recalls the atmosphere of the Spanish Civil War and the authoritarian ruptures of the 20th century. The descent begins as both a personal and collective fall, evoking displacement and exile.

 2. Labor and Industry
The voice shifts into an operatic female register, interwoven with soundscapes of spinning machines and human breath. Smoke fills the stairwell, evoking the dust-laden air of textile production and the gendered dimension of industrial labor. The body becomes a resonant chamber for collective memory, where exhaustion and rhythm intertwine.

 3. Migration and the Present
Finally, the voice fractures into birdsong. Sea waves and breath form the soundscape, a direct reference to contemporary migration routes across the Mediterranean. Wrapped in a silver emergency blanket, Li invokes the fragile condition of refugees and the ecological precarity of our era. Through double exposure, the sea merges with the stairwell, dissolving boundaries between place and time.


Throughout, the radio acts as a metaphorical time machine: transmitting poetry, static, and fragmented noise, it bridges different temporalities and unsettles the boundary between memory and present.

The work closes in resonance with Juan Ramón Jiménez’s poem El viaje definitivo (1910):

“And I will go. And the birds will keep singing.”