Tianjun Li (Timjune): Of Wind, Of Wiing
Solo Exhibition at Photographic Centre Nykyaika, Finland
Jan-Feb, 2026
Through reconstructed images, performance, and vocal gestures,
the exhibition examines migration and ecology as sensorial, translocal processes through the metaphors of wind and birds.
Tianjun Li’s practice draws on reconstructed images and vocal gestures as carriers of personal journeys and shared sensorial imagination. Within their work, the landscape is fragmented and recomposed. Wind, birds, breath, and light recur as relational forces through which belonging, freedom, and language are reimagined, forming a speculative ecological space.
The exhibition’s conceptual thread resonates with a passage by the philosopher Zhuang Zhou (4th century BCE), who described a legendary giant bird whose wings, when beating during migration, generate wind, and wrote that “生物之以息相吹也,” often translated as “all beings are animated by breath, mutually shaped through the act of breathing together.” Of Wind, Of Wing takes this idea as a poetic and structural proposition. Invisible forces move between bodies, landscapes, and memories, while wind marks the subtle movements that bind them.
The exhibition brings together Today, Tomorrow, and the Tales from the Wind (2024) and the ongoing project Free as Birds (2024–).
Today, Tomorrow, and the Tales from the Wind (2024)
Inkjet Print on archival paper, mounted on aluminum composite panel
39 × 39 cm
In Today, Tomorrow, and the Tales from the Wind, Li overlays landscapes from personal photographic archives of their hometown in China with images made in Finland and Iceland. Across distance and time zones, these layered images, together with exchanges of breath, humming, and wind-like vocal gestures, intertwine with field recordings and Li’s own vocal experiments. They form a surreal, dreamlike, and unsettled terrain where shifting ecologies and human migration intersect.
In the work, migratory birds from southern China appear above figures walking across Icelandic hillsides; City lights from the artist’s hometown flicker around children in Finnish forests; Trees that were cut down back home are reimagined as being replanted onto Icelandic landscapes marked by their own histories of deforestation.... Through these gestures, distant places are allowed to coexist within the same imagined space. The project positions imagination as a method to reconfigure post-migrant and ecological conditions beyond fixed geography and linear time.
𝘛𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺, 𝘛𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘪𝘯𝘥: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴
𝘝𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐𝘯𝘬𝘫𝘦𝘵 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘳,
79 x 79 𝘤𝘮
By overlaying photographs, the lighthouse beam and fireworks from the artist’s hometown, 10,000 km away, sweep across vast landscapes in this installation, reflecting post-migrant perception, shifting geographies, and memory, with light acting as a signal across distance and time.
Free as Birds
2024-2025
2-channel video Installation, maps-made wings, globe
Free as Birds expands this inquiry into a collective and translocal practice. Departing from the widely shared human projection of freedom onto birds, Li asks how such an image might be reconsidered amid fractured languages, restricted migration, and ecological precarity.
Birds appear as relational figures through which listening, translation, and coexistence can be rehearsed. Following the paths of migratory birds, Li has traveled to multiple islands across Europe through artist residencies. Through research into local vocal traditions, collaborative bird song choirs with local communities, and experiments with artificial intelligence as a tool for speculative translation of birds’ language.
Breathe, and You Are Home (2026)
2-channel video and sound installation
4:30 min | Stereo sound
Breathe, and You Are Home (2026) uses breath as a shared rhythm across distance, imagined as wind moving through geography to carry messages.
The work centers on a form of breathing communication between the artist and their mother, recorded separately in China and Finland. Superimposed onto the mother’s silhouette, the artist’s body spins in continuous circles across unfamiliar landscapes, like a suspended migratory condition where return remains unresolved. Projected onto wind-blown translucent fabrics, the two figures appear to gaze toward one another across distance, as breath moves through the space like wind.
Immersed in breathing sounds, the dual-channel soundscape brings together contrasting soundscapes from the artist’s hometown, from the Finnish Immigration Authority, and birdsong recorded in both China and Finland, responding across distance. The layers speak to the complexity of departure, the uncertainty of the migrant condition, the mother’s illness, and the gradual disappearance of the hometown amid tightening borders and ecological loss.
Breath appeared as a fragile but persistent connective tissue, an embodied archive through which kinship, memory, and survival continue beyond fixed geography and national boundaries.
The artist’s work was supported by Espoo Artist Grant.