Song of Emerging Endangerment
TJ Shin
October 25, 2025 – February 22, 2026
Los Angeles State Historic Park
Set to sound hourly from dawn to dusk.
Songs of Emerging Endangerment by artist TJ Shin, commissioned by Clockshop, is a sound installation using mimicry to map systems of global migration. Installed at Los Angeles State Historic Park in a city shaped by Cold War–era urban planning and waves of 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, 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. Participants in the first round imitated the field recordings of 15 species, selected based on their image, geographic range, and habitat. In the following rounds, participants mimicked the voices from the previous ones, creating a structure of repetition and response. This process of interpretation between people, birds, and their environment amplifies and reorganizes how information, bodies, and architectures circulate through landscapes shaped by US militarization.
Birdhouse air raid sirens, nicknamed after their appearance and once used as instruments of civic defense until 1985, can still be found throughout the Los Angeles landscape. Set to sound hourly from dawn to dusk, the reproduced two-channel siren serves as a timekeeper, punctuating the surrounding park and city’s rhythms. Projecting compositions of sonic feedback to hear the calls distinctly in proximity and faintly in distance, 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. The resulting sounds become signals, emphasizing how communication between people and surveillance technologies informs our relationships with natural, social, and built environments. At once a sonic rehearsal and social strategy, Songs of Emerging Endangerment invites reflection on the ways our urban spaces are shaped, and how our relationships to them might be reimagined.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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.
CREDITS
Songs of Emerging Endangerment by TJ Shin was commissioned by Clockshop and organized by Cat Yang, Director of Artist Projects, with Isabel Yi Jimenez, Project Associate. Clockshop’s projects at Los Angeles State Historic Park are supported through our long-standing partnership with California State Parks.
The production of this work was generously supported by Accelerated Resilience Los Angeles (ARLA), the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles Department of Arts and Culture, and Clockshop’s generous community of supporters.
OPEN CALL PARTICIPANTS
Joann Ahn, Elise Armani, Crystal Baik, Ako Castuera, Patty Chang and students, Misa Chhan, Sarah Cho, Sofia Thiệu D’Amico, Mira Dayal, Julia Deng, Mai Lian Feng, Inez Gruenberg-Kim, Joshua Her, Asuka Hisa, Delaney Holton, David Horvitz, Ela Melanie Horvitz, Amy Bell Hou, Grace Huang, Andrew Sung Taek Ingersoll, Amy Kahng, Kii Kang, Ren Kanoelani, Noah Kenji, Eleana Kim, Christine Y. Kim, Akari Komura, Heesoo Kwon, Ellie Lee, Ian Lee, Christopher Lin, Jane Liu, Annie Nguyen, Bảo Châu Thiệu Nguyễn, Tausif Noor, Kai Oh, Kiyoshi Okada, Alex Paik, Gigi Pun, Bao Ping Qu, Jerome Reyes, Martha Schnee, Patrick Shiroishi, Daniel Soto, Chen Qiu Tao, Adrian Techasith, Jacinda Tran, Noon Tran, Andy Wong, Mya Worrell, Callista Yank, Sue Bell Yank, Andrew Ye, Eugene Yi, Norge Yip, Amia Yokoyama, Kimberly Yu, Yian Ying Hu Yu, Maggie Zheng
