Los Angeles State Historic Park
2–4 PM
The closing reception of Songs of Emerging Endangerment, a sound installation by TJ Shin, features a conversation between Summer Kim Lee, Miljohn Ruperto (moderator), and Jacinda S. Tran. This program aims to offer perspectives from scholars and artists who engage with the historiography and construction of diasporic aesthetics and identities from the Asia-Pacific.
Songs of Emerging Endangerment, a sound installation by TJ Shin, uses mimicry to map systems of global migration from the Asia-Pacific. The project features a 30-foot-tall sculptural air raid siren that projects a composition of imitated bird calls scheduled throughout the day. In an open call process, over 50 participants connected to regions along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway were asked to imitate the calls of endangered bird species that travel the world’s largest bird migratory path. Set to sound hourly from dawn to dusk, the work examines how mimicry—and the differences it produces in process and perception—both extend and transform instruments of the Cold War and their fields of power. At once a sonic rehearsal and social strategy, the installation invites reflection on the ways our urban spaces are shaped, and how our relationships to them might be reimagined.
TJ Shin (b. 1993, Seoul) is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their multimedia practice, spanning film, video, installation, and sculpture, explores how structures of power discursively shape perception, form, and environment. Shin has exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Queens Museum, Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Arts, Lewis Center for the Arts, Montclair State University Galleries, Doosan Gallery, Knockdown Center, and more. Their writing has been published in Active Cultures, Asia Art Archive, the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse Magazine, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Summer Kim Lee is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (2025) is out with Duke University Press. Some of her other published work can be found in ASAP/Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Momus, The New York Times Magazine, Post45, and Social Text.
Jacinda S. Tran is an interdisciplinary scholar of visual culture, space, and empire. She is currently a visiting lecturer in the Program of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College, teaching in Asian American and queer studies.
Miljohn Ruperto (b.1971 Manila, Philippines) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Ruperto develops approaches to interrogating and expanding our conception of nature and history: e.g. historiography, the history of nature, and the nature of nature.