SCREEN MELANCHOLY: LI YI-FAN

at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan is pleased to present the Collateral Event Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition will be held at the Palazzo delle Prigioni from May 9 to November 22, 2026, featuring a new work by Taiwanese artist Li Yi-Fan and curated by Raphael Fonseca, curator of visual arts at Culturgest, Lisbon and Porto, Portugal. Both from a generation that witnesses the birth of internet technology, they explore the complex relationship between imagery, technology, and human experience in a dialogue that goes beyond regions and cultures.

Li works across painting, animation, game engines, and generative imagery to explore how images shape human perception, storytelling, and self-understanding in an era of information overload. Through dark humor, sarcasm and jump-cut narratives, he manipulates his puppet-like persona, revealing how contemporary modes of viewing are mediated by software and algorithms, and questioning how individuals reposition themselves amid infinitely reproducible images.

Originally conceived in Portuguese as Melancolia de tela, the exhibition title evolves across languages, unfolding new nuances that reflect on how screens mediate everyday life and shape the ways people perceive and experience the world. At the same time, the work responds to the theme of the Biennale Arte 2026, In Minor Keys, often associated with the melancholic atmosphere evoked by its musical metaphor.

The exhibition marks Li's third new creation employing game engine as a method for image production. He has further developed this into a site-specific piece unprecedented in his career, continuing his monologue narrative while reflecting on image-making tools within the “Software as a Service” framework. He addresses the Palazzo delle Prigioni’s historical and architectural context by transforming the space into a dynamic stage. As viewers immerse themselves within this former prison, the shifting scenes within the video mirror the physical surroundings. Together with the puppet-like characters, they experience the dissolution of boundaries between “reality” and “virtuality”.

This exhibition presents an installation integrating video and mixed media that encompasses the entire space. It marks the first such endeavor by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum since it began hosting exhibitions at the Palazzo delle Prigioni in 1995. Large-scale customized sculptures of fragmented limbs will be arranged throughout the space, resonating with characters emerging from the video as a juxtaposition of fictional and physical sensory experiences within the space. The unified whole of sculpture, video, and sound invites viewers to experience, at their own pace, the emotional and cognitive dissonance, and perceptual fatigue the artist explores. This leads to the core question posed by the exhibition title: “When life is short but knowledge is boundless, how do we respond to the world through ‘melancholy’?”

Li Yi-Fan shared: “I hope to bring the audience into a surreal space where they feel like viewing and at the same time being viewed. Just like the protagonist in this current work, the characters I animate feel like toys and like witnesses. The performance is real, but it is routed through a proxy body. In an age of information overload, this indirection might just be the barrier that keeps us safe enough to be vulnerable.”

Further addressing how relevant the exhibition is to our modern life Raphael Fonseca commented: “Yi-Fan’s absurdly humorous approach weaves the mundanity and anxiety in daily life into his unique, poetic examination of our identities in a world reshaped by technologies. The work gives the audience infinite room for questioning, both the blurred boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘digital, and more importantly, what exactly does it mean to be ‘human’?”

From lectures about computer animation to normal mapping, Li focuses on how images become increasingly generative in real time and infinitely replicable. In the exhibition, he transforms a feeling familiar to many people in Taiwan—living long-term alongside uncertainty—into humor, articulating how personal anxieties resonate truthfully with others on the island. He suggests that each of us contains something of the prisoner, the puppeteer, and the puppet. Rather than offering solutions or moralizing responses to the post-fictions and digital narcissisms of the twenty-first century, the artist brings the audience back to respond to the world with “melancholy”. Surrounding this, several keywords further guided the creation of this new work:

• The nature of viewing and how it evolves when computer graphics offer humanity a fresh way of browsing at excessive information
• Body as manipulated puppet-like protagonists, prompting viewers to question how the information we perceive online are filtered and dictated by algorithms
• The tension between humanity and technology especially since AI-generated images further influence perceptual structures.

During the opening week of the Biennale Arte 2026, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan Collateral Event will be accompanied by pre-opening and public programs on 7-9 May. A talk between Li and Fonseca will be held at 4-5pm on 7 May, exploring the curatorial journey. From 5pm on each day, a work titled “She seemed devastated, when I was weeping with joy” by South Korean artist Eunju Hong, will be performed in dialogue with Li’s exhibition. The performance engages with contemporary cultural themes of life, physicality, melancholy, and falseness, sparking diverse reflections in viewers through their shared and divergent approaches. More events and details will be announced shortly. For detailed information, please visit TFAM’s official website (www.tfam.museum) or follow Taipei Fine Arts Museum on Facebook, or tfam_museum on Instagram.

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