Li Yi-fan’s bizarre digital ‘puppet’ critiques a screen-obsessed world at Venice Biennale

Li Yi-fan is turning heads in Italy, where his bizarre take on the digital self-portrait represents Taiwan at the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale. The video artist’s digital avatar – or “puppet”, as Li calls it – is impossible to unsee. It is naked – genitals obscured – with plaster-like skin, and is hairless and cloudy-eyed. It is not just physically crude but verbally vulgar and provocative. This abrasive persona may well be Taiwan’s answer to other groundbreaking animated avatars, such as the futuristic clones by Lu Yang and Wong Ping’s childlike – yet adult in content – constructs. Li, who was born in Taipei in 1989, voices the digital gremlin, which also appeared in an earlier work at the 2023 Taipei Biennial and at the “Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud” exhibition in Hong Kong in 2025. The mouthy avatar is letting rip inside the Palazzo delle Prigioni, a 16th century former prison in Venice. Curated by Raphael Fonseca, the Taiwan Pavilion has transformed this historic space into a gloomy playground of our collective digital anxiety. A ‘broken up, distorted self-portrait’ Titled “Screen Melancholy”, the exhibition is dominated by a large screen showing the main animation, which stars Li’s puppet alongside a small army of “mini-mes”. Throughout the film, the main puppet switches between manipulating the smaller clones and treating them like renegades before he is overpowered by a giant version of himself. Li exemplifies the concept of digital artisanship. Fed up with the rigidity of traditional keyframe animation – where an artist provides the start and end points of an action and software fills in the middle – he created his own design tools by adapting video game engines. To build his creatures, he bought generic “Asian” digital body templates and modified them with scans of his own body. Fonseca describes the result as a “broken up, distorted self-portrait”. The smaller avatars even carry different organs on their heads – one has a singular eye – to represent our fragmented senses amid a constant barrage of stimulation. As Fonseca says, the organs argue “like in a soap opera”, though it is often the eye – trying to find its way home in the animation – that rules our screen-affixed lives. Inside a superb replica of the Italian prison, Li’s avatar – whose limbs jerk about like a zombie’s in a B-horror film, playing on the idea of being possessed by the artist – lectures the audience on the nitty-gritty of digital animation in a format similar to a YouTube tutorial. Sitting through a one-hour lecture by a chalky, 3D goblin, no matter how funny he is, demands great patience from biennale visitors. Thankfully, seating is provided in the form of giant 3D-modelled hands and feet, which are equipped with phone charging points. As the lecture is partly meant as a pastiche and a mockery of how we believe everything we see online, the audience is not expected to sit through the whole thing. But if you stick with it, the profound sorrow suggested by the exhibition’s “Screen Melancholy” title starts to break through the toilet humour and the cocky attitude of the bilingual star, who switches between English, Mandarin and Taiwanese. Puppets in a giant simulation For Li, “melancholia” encapsulates the dread of realising that we see the world through a flat, digital screen rather than a window. Still, he is not interested in examining the question of what is real and what is fake in the digital age, as we are all basically puppets in a giant simulation. Instead, he says that the only way to grasp the power behind digital illusions is to understand how they are made. Despite Taiwan’s rich heritage of budaixi, or glove puppetry, Li does not see himself as a puppet master sitting in the background. Instead, the artist – who works in his studio alone – treats his avatar less like a theatrical performance and more like “childhood practice, like playing with Lego”. As far as he is concerned, the puppet is a toy that he plays with on his own, and the audience just so happens to crash his private game. As a youngster tinkering with animation software, Li created “really violent” content simply because the digital realm felt isolated from reality and it was a “safe space” where he could get away with making anything. Today, in the age of the manosphere, that “safe space” aspect of the internet has a very different tone. Unfiltered, transgressive impulses unleashed online now frequently do real damage in the physical world. Li’s work suggests an ambiguous relationship with the online world – it is both a trap and liberating. It may come as a surprise to many viewers that Li has not relied on artificial intelligence, and the film’s limited use of AI is intentionally unconvincing, as the artist finds AI art boring. Towards the end, the puppet sheds thick, AI-generated tears. In a skewering of the performative nature of social media, the avatar makes this punchline: “How do you cry professionally in 2026? One thing I found out in the end is that the length still matters. You don’t cry too long. You cry only three seconds. Three seconds is the maximum. Or in another way, you cry 81 frames.” It is a work that is grim, acid and true. As Fonseca concludes in the exhibition catalogue, there is no turning back. “Bring your popcorn, because someone already hit the play button […] embrace the melancholia of this condition and prepare for our existences to become as flattened as a screen – and this is only the beginning”. “Screen Melancholy”, a collateral event at the 61st Venice Biennale, is open daily except on Mondays at the Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice. Until November 22, 2026.

Li Yi-fan’s bizarre digital ‘puppet’ critiques a screen-obsessed world at Venice Biennale

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Li Yi-fan, a video artist from Taiwan, is making waves with his creepy and funny avatars that question the way we see the world around us

A ‘broken up, distorted self-portrait’

Li Yi-fan, a video artist from Taiwan, is making waves with his creepy and funny avatars that question the way we see the world around us