THE MYTHICAL BIRD
神話之鳥：共享的天空
ABOUT
The Mythical Bird: A Shared Sky centres on the Chinese crested tern, a critically endangered seabird with a very small global population. Feared extinct for decades, it was rediscovered in 2000 on the islets of Matsu, when the filmmaker Liang Chieh-teh noticed unfamiliar birds among greater crested terns in his footage. Its long absence earned it the name “mythical bird”.
The work begins from that moment: a rare life revealed through attentive looking at an image. Gentle movement brings the tern into focus; fast movement scatters it; stillness lets its world surface around it, from fish and weather to the colony on its islet and the flyway that links Matsu with the wider region.
The tern’s movements connect shores divided by human political boundaries. Those boundaries do not organise its world, yet decisions made within them determine its chances of survival. The work asks whether care for a vulnerable species can become a shared responsibility across those divisions.
The prototype also follows the tern through a year, from wintering in the south to courtship, a single egg, hatching, fledging and departure, and lets visitors add birds to the colony from their phones.
Breeding timings follow Chen et al. (2011), Bird Conservation International. Migration routes are inferred from satellite tracking of greater crested terns from Matsu by National Taiwan University. Map coastlines are schematic.