Department of Cultural Affairs

“Screen Melancholy: Yi-fan Li”

Since 1995, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) has organized the Taiwan Pavilion at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, bringing renowned curators from Taiwan and abroad together with Taiwanese artists to connect Taiwan’s art scene with the global art world. 

This year, “Screen Melancholy: Yi-fan Li” is on view from May 9 to November 22 at the Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice, Italy. Representing Taiwan is new media artist Yi-fan Li, with Raphael Fonseca, a visual arts curator at Culturgest in Lisbon and Porto, Portugal, serving as curator. Both came of age just as internet technologies were beginning to take root. Now, in a dialogue that crosses geographical and cultural boundaries, they are exploring the complex relationship among images, technology, and human experience in the digital age. The opening attracted a large international audience, bringing together directors of arts and cultural institutions, curators, artists, and media representatives from around the world.

Yi-fan Li uses painting, animation, game engines, generative imagery, and other media to explore how images shape human perception, storytelling, and our understanding of ourselves in an age of information overload. He has developed his own puppet-control system for video performances, using a narrative style marked by dark humor and irony, combined with rhythmic jump-cut editing and a monologue delivered with the tone of an instructional video. 

Through this distinctive approach, Yi-fan invites viewers to reconsider the nature of how we view and consume images today, probing the power structures behind image production and asking how individuals position themselves within them. 

Forty years ago, Microsoft introduced the first version of Windows. From personal computers to mobile devices, the “window” on the screen has become a fundamental interface through which we understand and view the world. Against this backdrop, the title for this year’s Taiwan Pavilion is “Screen Melancholy”. On one level, this extends the art history concept of “melancholy” while responding to the anxiety and emotional unease brought about by the constant change of today’s digital environment. The title originates in the Portuguese phrase “Melancolia de tela,” referring to the melancholy generated by spending long periods with screens. Translated into English as “Screen Melancholy” and into Chinese as “鬱卒的平面,” the title opens up layered and poetic dialogues across different linguistic and cultural contexts.

This is Yi-fan’s third new creation to use a game engine as medium for image production. He has also developed it into an unprecedented site-specific work within his artistic practice. Continuing his one-person narrative format, the work reflects on the contradictions inherent in image-making tools under the “Software as a Service” model. 

It also responds to the historical and architectural context of the exhibition venue, transforming the Palazzo delle Prigioni into a dynamic stage. When viewers find themselves inside this former prison, the shifting scenes in the video mirror the reality unfolding before their eyes. Viewers and the puppet-like characters on screen seem to experience together the dissolution of the boundary between real and virtual, becoming caught in an endlessly loop of viewing and being immersed in a visual narrative of self-reflection.

Notably, the artist has incorporated the exhibition space itself into a unified multimedia installation, marking the first such attempt by TFAM since it began presenting exhibitions at the Palazzo delle Prigioni in 1995. Large-scale custom sculptures are scattered throughout the galleries, featuring fragmented body parts such as hands, feet, heads, and arms that echo the characters appearing in the video. Fictional and physical sensory experiences are thus placed side by side within the space. The sculptures, moving images, and sound come together as a single work—not to make psychological suggestions, but to invite viewers to experience, at their own pace, the emotional dislocation, epistemic gaps, and perceptual fatigue of the digital age that the artist seeks to evoke, all connected to the central ideas embedded in the exhibition title.

Through the exhibition, Yi-fan transforms the long-standing fears and uncertainties familiar to many in Taiwan into humor. He offers an honest portrayal of how personal anxieties can resonate with others on this island, while also turning toward another world of software use shaped by virtual digital interfaces, where shared knowledge across nationalities and languages, a sense of connection through systems, self-reflection, and self-mockery have emerged as experiences that resonate with people around the world. 

The exhibition also suggests that in the digital age, each of us simultaneously occupies the roles of prisoner, puppeteer, and puppet. Confronting an era of post-fiction and digital narcissism in the 21st century, Yi-fan offers neither solution nor moral judgment. Instead, he invites viewers to respond to the world anew through a state of “melancholy,” and to reflect on how we might rethink our place in the world and our understanding of ourselves.

▍2026 Taiwan Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia

“Screen Melancholy: Yi-fan Li”

Dates | Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, November 22 

Dates | Saturday, May 9 to Wednesday, September 30, 11:00–19:00

Thursday, October 1 to Sunday, November 22, 10:00–18:00

Closed Mondays, with special opening on Monday, November 16 

Venue | Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, Italy