2024-ongoing
Video Installation, Sound Art, Photography, Performance
The artist performs as a migratory bird, using fragmented maps as wings
and singing in AI-translated Bird’s language to trace movement across borders.
Excerpt of Free as Birds (2024-Ongoing)
4K Video, Stereo Sounds
Duration 5:29
人声，机器和想象，我们如何在流散的人类世唱出转译的鸟歌？
"How can we, through human voices and machines’ imagination, sing birdsongs reimagined for the dispersed Anthropocene?"
Free as Birds: Migrating draws parallels between the disrupted journeys of migratory birds and human migration under deforestation and increasingly restrictive immigration systems. Through performative video and vocal experimentation, the work reflects on displacement, adaptation, and the ongoing negotiation of belonging.
Imagining themself as a bird crossing borders, the artist performs wearing wings made from fragmented maps. The movement follows different stages of migration and leads to a confrontation with the border, exposing the tension between avian mobility and the limitations placed on human movement.
Using AI language models, the artist translates Hongyan, a Mongolian Chinese folk song about birds and migration, into speculative bird languages. These vocal forms absorb elements of Finnish vocal traditions. The slow process of learning and inhabiting this unfamiliar vocal system echoes the immigrant experience of navigating a new linguistic and cultural environment.
Performance at Aalto Media Lab (FI) , 2024
A! Festival, Akureyri Art Musuem (IS), 2025
By merging the human voice with AI language models, it aims to bridge the most ancient forms of communication with those being redefined in the modern era, evoking themes of linguistic barriers in human migration and posthuman imaginings of cross-species destinies.
Artist and vocalist Tianjun Li imagines themselves as a bird searching for a homeland. Adorned with fragile wings crafted from fragmented maps, they sing in AI-reimagined bird languages, interpretations of traditional folk songs about migration from diverse cultures. On a three-meter-long scroll of Chinese xuan paper (宣纸), they inscribe "the language of birds," while stretching their four-octave vocal range to mimic both natural and social landscapes, creating imaginative dialogues between humans and birds.
Li’s performances, filmed in various natural settings and transformed by AI into surreal dimensions, are presented through multi-channel video installations. The overlapping and intertwining human voices form a multicultural, cross-species AI-human Bird Song Choir, an immersive experience that blurs the boundaries between species, cultures, and the real and imagined.
A central element of the project is the artist’s use of AI to reinterpret traditional folk songs about migration as imagined "lyrics of the bird songs" and transform the films into surealist landscapes. Tianjun Li further integrates these AI-generated outputs into their vocal performance, using their expansive vocal range-spanning over four octaves-to mimic bird calls and create a surreal dialogue between himself and the birds.
By combining AI-driven language experiments, symbolic performances, and soundscapes layered with human and non-human voices, Free as Birds reflects on the interconnected destinies of ecological and human migrations. It questions the promises of freedom and belonging in a world shaped by inequalities and environmental crises, presenting a critical and imaginative narrative on the shared future of humans, machines, and the natural world.
Original Folk Song Lyrics
Wild geese soar in the sky, flying in rows side by side.
The river flows long, autumn grass turns yellow,
And the melody on the grassland carries sorrow.
Wild geese head south, gliding over the reed marsh.
The vast heavens stretch endlessly—where will the geese go?
In their hearts lies the homeland in the northern skies.
鸿雁天空上，对对排成行，江水长秋草黄，草原上琴声忧伤。 鸿雁向南方，飞过芦苇荡，天苍茫雁何往，心中是北方家乡.
- 吕燕卫《鸿雁》
New Bird Lyrics by AI language Model
Chiir-chiir koo-koo,
ki-ki ka-ka koo,
ri-ri laa chaa-rii,
chir chir waah hoo.
Waa-ka koo koo,
li-li cha-koo waah,
chir chir waa koo-ka,
ki-laa koo chir ka.
Stills from Free as BIrds (2024-ongoing)Video Installation,
Tianjun Li (Timjune): Of Wind, Of Wing
Photographic Centre Nykyaika (FI), 2026
Installation and Performance at YÖ Galleria, Helsinki (FI), 2024