TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The Taiwan Pavilion officially opened at the 61st Venice Biennale, transforming the historic Palazzo delle Prigioni into a labyrinth of giant, dismembered sculptures where visitors can sit on severed limbs to charge their smartphones.
Organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the site-specific multimedia exhibition "Screen Melancholy" features the work of Taiwanese new media artist Li Yi-fan (李亦凡). Curated by Brazilian independent curator Raphael Fonseca, the show marks the first time since 1995 that the museum has utilized the entire former prison for a single, integrated multimedia installation.
The exhibition tackles the psychological toll of the digital age, exploring whether humans are free operators or merely prisoners of algorithms in a world saturated by AI.
"For me, this is an honest expression," Li said in the interview with Taiwan News. He said that while social media platforms offer seemingly limitless knowledge, they also induce profound anxiety.
“Is what you see on your phone truly what you want to see, or is it just pushed to you? When you realize everything is being spoon-fed, that helplessness is the truest form of melancholy," Li said.
The title "Screen Melancholy" originated from Fonseca’s Portuguese concept "Melancolia de tela," which targets the collective depression stemming from prolonged screen time.
It aligns with the Venice Biennale’s broader theme, "In Minor Keys," which focuses on restrained and complex emotional states.
Li, who began his career in painting before moving to digital animation and game engines, describes his creative process as a "life-or-death struggle" against software limitations.
He said that the shift toward Software as a Service subscription models restricts artistic freedom by binding creators to corporate cloud regulations.
This corporate control has intensified with the rise of AI generation tools, according to Li. During his production process, Western AI tools blocked and censored unconventional prompts, such as images of vomiting.
However, Li found a different regulatory logic when he switched to Eastern open-source models, such as Tencent’s Hunyuan.
This gray area became the core of his visual narrative, which blends instant generation with the geopolitical uncertainties and collective anxieties unique to Taiwan.
Inside the pavilion, the fragmented sculptures of hands, feet, and heads evoke the white, eerie aesthetic of Japanese Butoh dance. To avoid the "uncanny valley" effect in the game engine, Li used 3D scans of his own face to create a hairless, distorted virtual character.
The 30-minute video piece mirrors the venue's architecture. Just as the Palazzo delle Prigioni was once a prison, the virtual puppets in the video are trapped in digital loops.
By installing phone chargers directly into the sculptures, Li plays on contemporary dependence on digital devices, forcing visitors into an unsettling dynamic.
"I wanted to break the fourth wall," Li said. "Visitors can charge their phones while the puppet on the screen turns around and looks right back at them."
Rather than offering moral lectures or solutions to deepfakes and digital narcissism, Li adopts the literary archetype of the Fool or Trickster.
He uses jump-cut editing and the tone of YouTube tutorials to deliver a dark comedy performance. Like avoiding the most predictable predictive text, Li intentionally seeks the most irregular paths within algorithm probabilities.
Fonseca cited the Latin proverb, "Vita brevis, ars longa" (Life is short, art is long), to summarize the project at this historical turning point of AI development.
The exhibition suggests that in the 21st century, every individual simultaneously holds three identities: the prisoner, the controller, and the puppet.
This dynamic captures how modern internet users act as controllers when clicking through screens, yet unwittingly become algorithmic puppets manipulated by corporate software. Ultimately, this voluntary addiction transforms the public into prisoners of an inescapable digital ecosystem, which becomes a paradox heightened by the exhibition’s physical setting inside a historic prison.
By embracing "melancholy" and using absurd humor to dismantle the fear of the unknown, the exhibition offers a subtle rebellion against a tech-driven world.
The exhibition runs through Nov. 22.
