Born in 1980 in Tainan, LEE Li-Chung graduated from the Department of Information and Communications, Chinese Culture University. Formerly working as a fashion magazine editor in the Northern Taiwan, he resigned and returned to Tainan in 2012. Recently, Lee has been fond of the homing instinct of racing pigeons. Through the studies of the pigeon racing culture, he aims to construct the routes of self-dialogue with respect to issues like belonging, fate, and post-globalization. In recent years, Lee has been accustomed to combing through literature and the subtle clues in history, intervening in the historical materials and the gaps thereof. As such, the artist put back the missing pieces of pigeon racing activities in the cultural context of Taiwan via narrative practices, while satisfying his obsession with pigeons.
Lee’s project is to construct and write a pigeon racing history of Taiwan as well as the contemporary Taiwanese history through several narrative works of “Taiwan Pigeon Trilogy.” The project was funded by the NCAF production grant, exhibition grants, among others. The first work Battle of Mt. Zhugao and Red Feet Ling was nominated by the Taishin Arts Award in 2019 and selected into the 2020 Kaohsiung Award. The second work The Memo of Formosa Air Battle was exhibited at Taiwan Biennial of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2020. In 2022, Lee is working with Lithuanian Art Museum on the core proposition of identity for a dialogue exhibition. Starting from 2021, the new work and the prequel, The Diary of Pontanus, has been published via art residency in succession, in which the artist was transformed into the protagonist in an epic quest for the pigeon’s presence across space and time