“I always wanted to make a film with voice-over,” the narration of Screen Melancholy states somewhere halfway through its running time. “It gives the film the feeling of an essay film.” This is one of many self-referential jokes in Li Yi-Fan’s audiovisual dissertation on digital animation, computer graphics and visual culture more broadly. The work is equal parts insightful and hilarious. The complete hour-long video is not yet available online, but the short documentary by Vernissage TV above offers a strong impression of the work, its origins and its presentation during La Biennale di Venezia 2026. Additional images and background information can be found on the website of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan.

Screen Melancholy was Taiwan’s contribution to the 2026 Venice Art Biennale. The video was shown in an old palazzo on the waterfront, and that setting is mirrored within the work itself: the entire presentation takes place inside a digital recreation of the Palazzo delle Prigioni. Li Yi-Fan fills this virtual set with references to the history and practice of animation, from the phenakistiscope and thaumatrope to keyframe-based computer animation. Much of the work’s expressive power does not come from the voice-over, but from the on-screen presenter: a digital puppet, a virtual avatar of the artist controlled through a game engine. This makes the movements of his naked doppelgänger highly expressive, both lifelike and larger than life.

The universe Li Yi-Fan creates inside his digital pavilion is distinctly surreal. For example, it is populated by multiple versions of his digital avatar, each representing a different human organ. These organs compete for relevance and importance, with many lamenting that the eye appears to get all the attention. At one point, an armoured tank crashes through the walls of the digital set. Li Yi-Fan immediately admits that it was generated by AI and, with a sense of irony, asks for a moment of silence to acknowledge this fact.

Screen Melancholy operates firmly in the essayistic mode rather than the documentary register. Li Yi-Fan invites us to consider how contemporary animation software and technology relate to reality, and how they shape our appetite for visual entertainment. He does so from within the very technology he examines. He takes us behind the scenes (and behind the code) of animation software. Presets such as linear, cubic or constant motion: do these movements even exist in the real world? And what about TikTok filters that imitate the look of degraded VHS tapes? What do they reveal about our desire for visual nostalgia? The video touches on memes, the impossibility of truly random computer-generated noise, polygon counts as status symbols, and colour and texture maps in 3D rendering. Li Yi-Fan jumps between subjects at a frantic pace, mixing sharp observations with self-deprecating remarks and deliberately silly and absurd asides.

“Our desire for images is pretty flexible,” Li Yi-Fan’s digital double tells us. “The image itself doesn’t even matter. It’s just something to project your feelings on. So it’s not about being real or fake. It’s about whether you… Whether you can project your desire onto this flat surface”. Screen Melancholy both indulges and interrogates that desire, satisfying our craving for distinctive images while simultaneously making us question our own visual appetites.