Li Yi-Fan

What Is Your Favorite Primitive

18.7.-16.8.2025

Opening: Friday, 18.7.2025; 5-9pm

 

Yi-Fan Li’s practice is marked by a uniquely personal, conceptually rigorous approach that challenges our habitual ways of seeing, feeling, and telling. In an age where the boundaries between image, identity, and information are constantly shifting, Li offers not only new techniques but new questions—about perception, subjectivity, and the possible futures of human expression.

Li’s works often integrate game engines and real-time rendering technologies, allowing him to improvise intricate 3D animations with performative immediacy. Yi-Fan Li describes his creative process as the depiction of a death struggle between artist and software, from whose resulting decaying corpse a narrative work gradually emerges. By using a video game engine Yi-Fan Li reflects not only on the peculiar suspension of time in video games but also on the increasingly detailed desires that emerge from the possibilities of increasingly complex technological tools. Embedded in the aesthetic context of „Machinima“ – a filmic genre that became popular in the 1990s, in which films are created from video games, allowing players to manipulate scenes and characters – Yi-Fan Li reforms the traditional production of image and animation through the deliberate manipulation of virtual spaces.

What Is Your Favorite Primitive (2023), for example, takes the form of a satirical tech keynote presentation, in which a protagonist grapples with the ethical and societal questions embedded in software tools designed for image production. Through this work, Li reflects on how images reshape modes of communication and how emojis might transmit emotional meanings that surpass individual perception. At its core, the piece speculates whether image technologies might one day project an as-yet-unrealized totality—constructing a new politics of life and death.

Li Yi Fan’s howdoyouturnthison responds to the genes of the digital age and its mutated memories with unique black humor. Behind the seemingly absurd and eccentric images, a fascinating narrative technique and its script are constructed. LI overturns the historical toolbox of „machinima,“ skilfully manipulating his avatar that wriggles without physical constraints. The ghost in the shell stimulates the viewer’s bodily perception, and its murmured confessions draw everyone to unconsciously enter the inner world of image production. The mutual generation of post-human body and virtual reality modelling language (VRML) reflexively exposes the alternative reality of the Internet generation, releasing the becoming of images and liberating the narrative language. With howdoyouturnthison, artist Li Yi-Fan tampers with the process of image making by devising a tool for self–image making to reflect on the possibilities of contemporary visual aesthetics.

 

Yi-Fan Li (*1989 in Taipei) currently lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied New Media at the National Taiwan University of Art and Fine Art at the National Normal University in Taiwan.
His recent solo exhibitions include SAVE AS (2023) at VT Artsalon in Taipei and Shelter of CHAOS.zip (2019) at the Digital Art Center in Taipei. Recently, he was featured in group exhibitions such as Dreamscreen (2024) at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, ICC Annual 2024: Faraway, So Close (2024) at the NTTICC Museum in Tokyo, and Hardcore Drive (2024) at the TOFU Space Gallery in Copenhagen.
He has received several awards, including the Golden Harvest Award in 2024 and the Taishin Arts Award in 2022. Next year, Yi-Fan Li will represent Taiwan at the Venice Biennale 2026.