Echo, Kaiku, Huisheng 回声、回声、回声
2025 - Ongoing
Multi-Channel Video Installation, Sound, Performance
Preview of Echo / Kaiku / Huisheng (Ongoing, Updated on August 2025)
Echo / Kaiku / Huisheng (Echo, echo, echo) is an ongoing multi-channel sound and video project by Tianjun Li that explores migration, identity, and ecological listening through site-specific, wordless vocal improvisations.
In each performance, Li uses the human voice as a minimal and universal medium to respond to natural and urban soundscapes, transforming everyday environments into ephemeral, poetic resonances. The performances are recorded and simultaneously shared on both Western and Chinese social media platforms, bypassing censorship and internet firewalls, forming a borderless archive that connects distant audiences across languages, geographies, and digital divides.
Over time, each act of singing builds on the previous ones, creating a layered, polyphonic choir that unfolds across space and time, reflecting on mobility, presence, environmental change, and the potential of the human voice to bridge divided worlds.
Minimal and poetic in form, the project treats the wordless voice as a bridge across divided worlds, a gesture of connection that moves freely through languages, geographies, and systems of control. Each performance is recorded and simultaneously shared on both Western and Chinese social media platforms, bypassing censorship and the internet firewall. In this way, the project also becomes an experiment in how art circulates today, resisting increasing digital control through the openness of pure sound.
Helsinki-based interdisciplinary artist Tianjun Li (born 1999 in China) works with photography, voice, and performance. With a vocal range of over four octaves, Li explores the voice as a medium that moves between human and non-human expression. Since 2022, they have developed the Singing Walk practice, performing and recording non-verbal vocal improvisations in public spaces. These performances, shared online, have reached more than 140,000 followers and 20 million views across Instagram and China’s RedNote, forming a borderless and participatory audience that extends the work beyond its physical locations.
Initiated as a long-term project in 2025, Echo / Kaiku / Huisheng documents Li’s ongoing vocal dialogues with soundscapes from Arctic circles to Mediterranean islands. Each new performance begins by listening to and resonating with the previous one, creating a layered polyphonic choir that evolves across time and geography.
The project reflects on presence within global mobility, identity transformation, and environmental change, drawing from ideas in acoustic ecology and posthumanist thought. Each vocal act is both a site-specific response and part of a wider collective resonance. The final form will be presented as an immersive multi-channel installation that positions the audience within a shifting and borderless choir, where self, others, and place remain in constant dialogue.