Timjune Tianjun Li 李天竣


Current and Past Exhibitions

Performances
Projects  

          i am (2026-ongoing)


          The Last Sunset (2026)

  1. Free as Birds (2024-ongoing):

  3. Bird Collisions (2026)

    I See Birds Now (2026)      

  5. Migrating (2024) 

  6. Imagine (2025)

  8. Those Who Flew Before Me (2025) 

  10. Cloudcuckooland (2025)

    And I shall go, and the birds will continue singing (2025)
     I
  11.  
  12. Today, Tomorrow, and the Tales from the Wind (2024)

  14. Echo, Echo, Echo (2025-ongoing)
     () E 
  15. Breathe, and You Are Home (2026)

    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)

     
  • BIO/CV

I See Birds Now


2026  
4K Video, Stereo Sound, 3:07,  Video Installation


The artist follows birds with their gaze, while birds in flight and migrating flocks appear reflected in the pupils.
Accompanied by a chant-like monologue, the work traces how the human gaze projects the desire and imagination of freedom onto the flight of another species.


 Video Excerpt and Installation View 


What kind of freedom becomes visible when we look at another species, and what kind of human desire is contained within that gaze?

Birds have long occupied the human imagination as figures of freedom. Their ability to move through the sky appears to offer an image of unrestricted mobility, seemingly detached from borders, territories, and the physical limitations of the human body. I See Birds Now begins with this familiar projection and turns the gaze back toward the observer.

The artist follows birds with their gaze, while images of birds in flight and migrating flocks appear reflected in the pupils. The eye becomes a surface onto which the bird is projected. Through a chant-like vocal monologue embedded within a spatial soundscape, the work moves between looking, listening, and imagining, tracing the human desire to understand freedom through the movement of another species.

What appears to us as freedom may reveal as much about human desire as it does about the conditions of avian life. Migration involves orientation, seasonal movement, territorial negotiation, vulnerability, and dependence on changing environments, dimensions that disappear when flight is reduced to a romantic image of unrestricted freedom. I See Birds Now considers the distance between the bird as it exists beyond us and the bird we construct through our own imagination.





Holographic Installation View 
Tianjun Li: Bird Collisions, Forum Box, Helsinki (FI), 2026
Photography by Anna Autio