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 IV:
Those Who Flew Before Me


2025
Photography, video installation, participatory performance, and voice-based soundwork

Created during the Island Connect artist residency in C.IN.E., and Suralita Creation Center + Konvent Art Center Residency in Mallorca, 2025


Local choirs imagine being free as birds,
using collective voice and AI-translated bird language,
to revisit time and memory shaped by systems of authority


Video and Performance Installation, 
Akureyri Art Museum (IS), 2025
Photographic Centre Nykyaika (FI), 2026


Those Who Flew Before Me was developed in Sineu, Mallorca, in collaboration with a local choir, formed by elders.

Working across photography, video projection, and participatory choir ritual, the project examines time, memory, and imagined freedom through collective voice. It draws from lived childhood memories shaped by authoritarian governance, linguistic regulation, and cultural suppression, using the figure of the bird as a shared metaphor for freedom across generations.

The title is drawn from a line by Mallorcan poet Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel, whose writing emerged under the censorship imposed on Catalan language and culture. The image of the migratory bird moving between presence and disappearance becomes a way to think about interrupted transmission, silenced voices, and the fragility of cultural memory.

"Ocell emigrador que vas i véns / Pensa només que aquell és el fossar dels meus ocells d’infància"
("Migratory bird who comes and goes... Just remember that place is the graveyard of my childhood birds.")

To extend this line beyond the human and across time, the artist used AI language models to translate the poem into a speculative birdsong based on local avian vocal patterns. This non-semantic vocal score was taught to the choir and performed collectively, allowing participants to temporarily inhabit a voice outside regulated language.

"ti‑ti‑ti‑whee, ti-kee ti-kee swooe‑eh,
wee‑kee‑waa swo‑kaa ti‑kaa;
wee‑kee‑waa swo‑kee ki‑waa tsee‑ah."

The performances took place in an austere hall with bare concrete walls, where sound and reverberation shaped the experience as much as image. Wearing translucent paper wings, the performers moved through light and shadow while video projections layered their bodies with aerial perspectives.

The project corresponds with Free as Birds: Cloudcuckooland (2025), in which a children’s choir collectively reimagines a utopian world of freedom as birds.





Photography Series, 2025