The Condition of the Screen
Born in Taipei in 1989, Li Yi-Fan belongs to a generation shaped by Taiwan’s rapid transformation into one of the world’s most technologically connected societies. Growing up amid the expansion of internet culture, gaming environments, digital labour, and hyper-connectivity, his work reflects a lived familiarity with systems that increasingly mediate how reality is experienced and understood.
Taiwan occupies a uniquely complex position within global technology culture—not only as a major centre of technological production, but also as a place shaped by layered histories of political precarity, global visibility, and cultural negotiation. Within Li’s practice, technology never appears as neutral. Instead, it emerges as something deeply psychological: a structure shaping behaviour, memory, identity, and emotional life itself.
Rather than rejecting or celebrating these systems, Li works from within them. Using self-developed tools, game engines, machinima aesthetics, and what he describes as “digital puppetry,” he constructs immersive environments that expose the mechanics of image production itself.
“My practice has always been rooted in personal emotions,” Li Yi-Fan explains, “but in this project, I ask how these intimate thoughts resonate collectively with others from my generation.”
“I hope viewers of Screen Melancholy embrace both a solitary journey and a shared venture into the world we all live in right now, reshaped by technology and dictated by algorithmic systems.”
The result is a body of work that moves fluidly between absurdity and unease—simultaneously humorous, melancholic, and psychologically disorienting.
From Dürer to Digital Excess
A key conceptual thread within the exhibition is its dialogue with Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), the iconic engraving depicting a figure paralysed by intellectual overwhelm.
Li Yi-Fan reinterprets this condition through the logic of contemporary image culture. If the Renaissance melancholic suffered from limits of knowledge, today’s condition is defined by excess: endless streams of information, images, notifications, and algorithmically generated content.
The exhibition reflects this state of saturation. Images no longer function as stable windows onto reality, but as endlessly circulating surfaces detached from physical experience.
Li articulates this shift directly:
“Image was once so important. It connects us with the world like a window. But now that we realize this window is nothing but a flat surface, how should we respond?”
Within Screen Melancholy, melancholy becomes less an individual emotion than a shared social atmosphere—distributed across networks, feeds, interfaces, and systems of perpetual visibility.
Digital Puppetry and the Visible System
Li Yi-Fan’s practice is defined by a desire to make invisible systems visible. His concept of “digital puppetry” foregrounds manipulation, construction, and control—disrupting the illusion that digital systems are seamless or objective.
Working with self-built game engines and improvised virtual environments, he intentionally leaves traces of process exposed. Glitches, repetitions, artificial movements, and fragmented bodies become part of the visual language itself.
At the centre of the exhibition is a 60-minute video work accompanied by additional moving-image installations and large-scale 3D-printed body fragments—hands, limbs, and heads distributed throughout the space. These sculptural forms double as seating, collapsing distinctions between viewer, object, and performer.
The exhibition’s central narrative—an “eyeball” returning home—operates less as a linear story than as a surreal psychological journey through systems of perception, surveillance, and image construction.
Rather than immersing viewers in technological fantasy, Li continually reminds us of the systems operating beneath the image.
