Since we decided this exhibition would be called Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan, we spoke at length about the many interpretations this sequence of words might evoke. Although the title was first conceived in Portuguese, we already knew that, once translated into English and Mandarin, its poetics would open space for new nuances. But which screens, after all, are we referring to? The immediate answer seems obvious: the very surface through which I write these words and through which audiences – across different formats, materials, and brands – will encounter part of Li Yi-Fan’s work. Yet these black-mirrored devices carry a long history that exceeds their current ubiquity: their genealogy extends from television to dark cinema theatres, through photography, and back to painting and Leon Battista Alberti’s famous 1450 metaphor of “painting as a window.” 

The term “window” is hardly accidental; Microsoft launched the first version of Windows forty years ago. Like passengers inside a car or train who watch moving landscapes unfold, today we peer into compact windows that offer fragments of everything. From this excess, this eternal listing of possibilities, ideas, intersections, discoveries, and doubts, emerges the melancholia we name here. Vita brevis, ars longa: life is short, knowledge is long – especially in a historical moment when artificial intelligences surround us and remind us of this constantly. Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan marks an essential new step in Li Yi-Fan’s practice, even as it preserves the anxiety trigger that has accompanied more than a decade of production. The exhibition’s central video, shown on a LED panel, has all its actions staged inside a simulation of the Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice. It is an unprecedented site-specific gesture in the artist’s trajectory. This building, once part of a prison linked to the Doge’s Palace and completed in 1614, holds layers of memory. The enclosed bridge connecting the two structures – the Bridge of Sighs, built that same year – was named for those who glimpsed their last view of Venice before entering cells that might consume the rest of their lives. To stage an exhibition in this Palazzo is to remain open to its energetic and narrative charge. If the artist’s work often displays something theatrical – through his interest in maquettes, puppets, and rendered stage-like compositions – here, in this location, that is taken to another intensity, producing moments of metatheater and mise-en-abyme. Between existentialism and the absurd, the words spoken by the puppet-characters in this narrative move from micro-histories to macro-narratives and constantly play with the limits of the narrator's autonomy. Video can be seen as a type of magic – and, trick after trick, our attention remains held for dozens of minutes. From lectures about computer animation, we hear discussions of differences between “high” and “low” culture images and learn about normal mapping and methods for simulating textures on digital surfaces. 

Our eyes and neural synapses become pinballs inside this visual and conceptual arcade. Unsure of where we are being led, we follow the puppets whose rhetoric resembles that of a very peculiar classroom. Soon we realize that the exhibition space also hosts large 3D-printed sculptures – hands, feet, a head, part of a leg, arms – echoing the bodies of the digital performers. These outscaled fragments introduce a theatrical, fantastical dismemberment rooted in computer-generated imagery. Discovering that we may sit on these objects, we do so instinctively. The human body sits upon an imitation of itself to watch a performance by digital puppets that also emulate its form; the boundaries between “real” and “virtual” dissolve. Viewers become performers for the next group to enter. Sitting in this former prison, phone in hand – either to record or to momentarily escape – we appear, if filmed from afar, trapped in a loop: our behaviors mirroring and mirrored by Li Yi-Fan’s poetics. Rather than offering solutions or moralizing responses to the post-fictions and digital narcissisms of the twenty-first century, the artist suggests that each of us contains something of the prisoner, the puppeteer, and the puppet. Let us embrace the melancholia of this condition and prepare for our existences to become as flattened as a screen. There’s no turning back.