One of the main missions of the IAC – Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes is to showcase monographic exhibitions of emerging artists. Presently, Li Yi-Fan’s “Last Warning” encompasses four rooms, one work per room. Curator Sarah Caillet describes the artist’s approach as implementing “radical DIY”: reworking gaming engines for which he’s written his own code, in order to manifest “fascination, saturation, and disorientation.” The artist, who showed at the Taipei Biennial in 2023, will represent Taiwan at the Venice Biennial in 2026. He is not just a hacker but a “digital craftsman,” with a dark sense of humor about the whiplash speed of technological obsolescence and the relentlessness of digital disruption. He explores these themes by way of skewed video game design and animation. In an interview for the Taipei Biennial, curator Freya Chou praised Li Yi-Fan’s work as “authentically weird” and as loosely belonging to a tradition of the grotesque or body horror. During the conversation, Yi-Fan said he uses “guerrilla tactics” to navigate industrially produced digital content, as well as the “work around,” which, in the context of software programming, a disapproving term meaning to “circumnavigate or piece parts together.”1
In the exhibition’s first video, a six-minute work from 2024, If You Can’t Larp, You’ll Cry—LARP being an acronym for Live Action Role-Playing — Yi-Fan name-drops hacker groups and cyberattacks (Klez, WannaCry, Perseus). The featured stage performance is part ballet, part military formation of faceless figures who crudely resemble root vegetables. They are guided by a choreographer (the movements were conceived in collaboration with dancer Harrison Hall) with only a green, faceless upper body. “How will we atone when we have replaced mortar with altars of code?” wonders an anonymous voiceover, musing on the devout cult of digital systems as a new form of the sacred. The voice further speaks of a voraciousness — “forever reinventing over and over to fill the void” — that is both human and technological, unflagging in nature.
Shown on a curved screen, important_message.mp4 (2019–20) is a seventeen-minute, avatar-led video that immerses the viewer in a tornado of clickbait conspiracy theories. Yi-Fan presents these alarmist cyberspace tall tales, sourced from internet content farms, in a deliberately retro early-2010s Windows aesthetic. Allegedly anchored by “studies” and “research,” the mix of fake and true is indistinguishable. Here absurdism abounds, whether it’s a parasite growing in snails or bath salts causing male aggression. Cats dance on hind legs, confetti-style hundred dollar bills rain down flashes of Benjamin Franklin, male chastity belts materialize, psychoactive drugs are repurposed as aphrodisiacs, the Chinese origin of the term “brainwashing” is discussed, the zombie is ascribed to the suffering of slaves during the eighteenth century. This wild miscellany is interspersed with manic interludes of pounding metallic sounds and fluorescent backgrounds. “Through technology, it is possible to rewire the human brain,” the avatar pronounces in a lime-green speech bubble. The internet reshapes us; we’re rudderless amongst deceitful algorithms.
Boring Gray (2021–25), a multi-channel video installation projected onto printed cardboard silhouettes, is a reference to the software that strips color from interfaces with the intention of diminishing their potential for distraction. But Boring Gray, like important_message.mp4, has a feeling of delirium: The four-part diorama (reduced from its original five parts to fit the room) is bathed in quick-shifting projections while text unfurls on the ground. Shamans failed, the text indicates, but “scientists from the West Coast succeeded.” The danger inherent in progress is laid out thusly: inventing the car is also inventing the car accident; inventing the cruise is also inventing the Titanic. Our advancements can’t outsmart our demise.
The exhibition concludes with What is Your Favorite Primitive, a thirty-seven-minute video from 2023 using a video game engine that allows the artist to improvise with animations. There are bald body-painted figures with marionette-like movements, deliberations on the virtues of high school math as a tool to calculate perspective, usage of a Polaroid camera, and a figure hanging by its neck from the ceiling over red velvet cinema seats — distressfully, exactly like the ones the viewer is sitting in. “People used to be scared of being photographed,” says the voiceover, recalling a time when the medium was new and thought to ‘steal’ the soul. As if human quintessence has changed, the voice continues: “Isn’t personal info your soul in the twenty-first century?” Stealing that, of course, is a different swindle altogether.
