Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan

Screen Melancholy 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.

Much of Yi-Fan’s work inclines toward the theatrical – maquettes, puppets, and staged compositions – yet here, in this historically charged space, these interests gain new intensity, creating moments of metatheatre and mise-en-abyme. From reflections on VHS texture to debates on “high” and “low” culture and explanations of normal mapping and surface simulation, this new group of works drawn us into a meditation on the construction of images themselves.

Unsure of where we are being led, we follow the puppets whose rhetoric resembles that of a very peculiar classroom. Soon we realise 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. 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.