Contemporânea

Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan, Taiwan’s official collateral event at the 61st Biennale di Venezia (2026), a solo project by Li Yi-Fan curated by Raphael Fonseca, contributes to a wider conversation about the tensions between image-making and image consumption. Li does not seem to grant images a dominant position. Quite the opposite: he asks what our role is in relation to images—as creators or consumers, animators or spectators, deceivers or the deceived. I am not particularly prone to making strong speculative claims about epochal shifts, visual revolutions, or the potential death of discourse. However, it does seem that images have at least challenged the primacy of linguistic communication and expression, to the point that whenever a friend tells me they have read something, I can’t help wondering whether they actually saw it on TikTok.

I arrive at the Palazzo delle Prigioni to visit Screen Melancholy on Monday, 1 June. It is late morning, and the weather is hot and humid. At the entrance, I ask a woman in a small, vintage-looking booth made of wood and glass how to get into the exhibition. Pointing to a series of sheets of paper stuck to the glass, she asks me which exhibition I intend to visit. Alongside Screen Melancholy, I am offered two options. The first, entitled Lords of the Night Prison Palace: Cells and Torture Tools (Escorted Visit), proposes a “route through places that have remained inaccessible until today,” including prison cells and the infamous torture chamber, accompanied by “a guide dressed as a true Lord of the Night," who would explain to me “what it meant to be a prisoner: what they ate, how they lived, and the conditions they endured.”2 The second, Maleficia: Inquisition, Torture and Witchcraft (15th–18th Century), promises, through “evocative testimonies, documents and objects,” to reveal “the mysteries, secrets, legends and historical facts that marked the thousand extraordinary years of the Most Serene Republic.”3 When I tell her that I’d like to visit Screen Melancholy, she informs me that the exhibition is closed, and that I should come back the following day. Simulacra of a past use of the same architecture that Screen Melancholy inhabits today, these exhibitions/experiences promise to satisfy visitors' desires, this time through a reenactment turned into a commodity.

In contrast, Li Yi-Fan’s world is in a state of constant construction. Just as the video contains nested reproductions, the late-Renaissance architecture of the Palazzo delle Prigioni (designed by the architect Antonio da Ponte and built at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries to expand the prison facilities of the Palazzo Ducale) houses enlarged 3D-printed parts of a human body on which viewers can sit while watching the video piece and, if needed, charging their mobile phones. Animation is therefore akin to building a place or assembling a body—all constituent elements of the process through which we make the world we live in. Invited to learn animation techniques and participate in a production process that is as technical and material as it is imaginative and emotional, I scan the QR code inside the video, which, in a call to join forces, asks the spectator to take an animation course. However, as soon as I click on the hyperlink, it opens a YouTube video of Rick Astley’s "Never Gonna Give You Up." From the comments section, I learn about the practice of "Rickrolling," a prank that has since gone viral (though I was unaware of it), whereby a hyperlink opens the music video instead of taking you to the website you’d expect. What I initially take for randomness quickly reveals itself as a standardised procedure.

After visiting the installation, I return to W. J. T. Mitchell’s seminal work What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, in which the author writes that the main problem with critical theory as it relates to the study of images concerns the power we attribute to them. We want images to be more powerful than they actually are because, in reality, what we want is to attribute that power to ourselves: to create them, exhibit them, worship them, oppose them, and destroy them. Instead, Mitchell argues, “[w]hat pictures want from us, what we have failed to give them, is an idea of visuality adequate to their ontology.”4 Many others have been asking the same question. What do pictures want? Roland Barthes argues that every image wants to be something, but considering the plurality of interpretations, meaning is impossible to own.5 Nicholas Mirzoeff writes that, given the saturation of our daily lives with screens, what matters to images is being looked at.6 The white-paint-covered CGI protagonist of Screen Melancholy seems to agree with Mitchell, claiming that the image itself does not even matter; it is something onto which we project our desires. And so, it has more to do with the possibilities of our imagination than with what it represents. The character therefore asks the audience: “Can you still see things you never imagined? Can you still imagine things you have never seen?”

What we actually hope online image consumption might lead to—not in the sense of making this consumption performatively productive, but in terms of what imagery (or, as the video suggests, “things we never imagined”) might spring from it—is a question that recurs throughout the video work. Since online visual culture today permeates most spheres of our daily lives, from work and food consumption to dating and financial investments, an immediate response might point to a hopeful sense of belonging, a shared language to which we can return, an architecture built through posting and sharing that unites us. We might not be physically together, but we are all scrolling in the same way. However, I also believe that users go online to discover, build, and protect a different image of self. British geographer Gillian Rose argues that “our immersion in a certain kind of visuality and our encounters with certain kinds of visual images shape us into particular kinds of subjectivity.”7 “The way you watch defines who you are,” the protagonist of Screen Melancholy similarly suggests, “or maybe the way you stare defines who you are.”

This kind of relationship between image and subjectivity is particularly relevant to the visual-first generation. Li understands this relationship as infrastructural, in that it produces reality through the device. Similarly, Kenneth Goldsmith writes that even his children are enthusiastic about thinking of themselves as images; his first visual experience of parenthood—even before they were born—came through gynaecological ultrasound scans.8 From that moment on, there was no stopping it: hundreds of photographs, taken first with digital cameras and later with mobile phones and iPads, have multiplied their representations into a continuous surplus, leaving him to choose which ones to share and post while forgetting the existence of all the others. “Abundance is a lovely problem to have, but it produces a condition whereby the management of my cultural artefacts … is overwhelming their actual content,”9 Goldsmith writes, as he tries to decipher a digital ecology that runs on quantity. At the same time, he continues, “[s]ocial media’s genius is its levelling of quality: every voice has the same volume and every link is an urgent call to action.”10

Often described as a postmodern archive, the web nevertheless remains a context that is often obscure to its users. While we all contribute to its composition—by uploading personal photos to social media, training the algorithm through Google searches, or pinning images on Pinterest—when the time comes to find something, it is always difficult to locate the items in question. The internet resembles an archive whose cataloguing rules are defined by their very ambiguity, accessible not to users but only to the archivists—ghostly figures with whom we are not allowed to interact. In trying to express this idea, I find myself at a loss for words to describe the strangeness of this sensation—a dialectic between a digital ether and the subjectivities that interact with it, in which the relationship between reality and experience leaves no room for exhaustive knowledge, only for partial representation. As Li writes, the creative process with software resembles a "death-match" more than a solution.

Producing or consuming images does not, therefore, become an alternative dimension of our material, worldly existence, but rather an integral part of it—a veritable online prosthesis of mundane embodiment, as well as a virtual extension of our intellect. However, through the figure of the puppeteer, Li proposes a choreographed, controlled dimension to these digital modes of production and consumption. In fact, the possibility of acting in this way entails an extreme degree of dependence. Shortly after entering the Palazzo delle Prigioni, I hear the character ask the audience whether they are charging their phones: charging stations are generously provided inside the exhibition space, with various cables emerging from the seats, compatible with most major brands. Standing near a seat shaped like a human forearm, I notice two women charging their phones and checking their social media feeds while the character in the video exclaims, “it’s gross to charge in public.” It is “disgusting,” “disturbing,” “disappointing.” And I find myself agreeing: I even find it shameful—a sign of poor battery management and a lack of self-control. If the desire to build and make use of this digital world is so strong and pervasive, how is it possible that they already need to charge their phones at 11 am? Phones are not just display screens but also essential world-making infrastructures. We need them constantly charged.

Finally, there remains the question of what the melancholy in the title refers to. Perhaps it is the melancholy that stems from not knowing exactly what we are looking at—whether we are complicit puppeteers in this system, or are constantly being trolled as our expectations and hopes are dashed by what the screen presents to us. Or perhaps it is the melancholy of realising—or perhaps failing to realise—that we don’t know exactly what we’re doing in front of our screens: “to look is to labor,” Jonathan Beller writes, “all looking in a commodity economy is work.”11 Although there might be no return from this condition, this melancholy can also be generative. As Li Yi-Fan’s wise creature suggests, “maybe it is the way you cry that defines who you are.”

Li Yi-Fan