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2025
COLLABORATIONS
HONG ✕ TAIPEI DANGDAI
MAKING OF ... LI YI-FAN
YI-FAN LI
2025/05/09 - 05/11
Li Yi-Fan, an artist who has the long-standing patronage of the Hong Foundation, will represent Taiwan at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026. As a warm-up to the event, the Foundation has curated Making of…Li Yi-Fan, a focused presentation of the artist’s earlier works from 2020 to 2023, tracing the development of his distinctive visual lexicon and narrative methodology.
Taking game engines and real-time video as points of departure, Li pioneers new possibilities of contemporary image making through self-developed software tools, generating digital avatars that drift along the fissures of our technological world. In the liminal space between dark humor and the erratic ramblings of Kiang Kiang—an onomatopoeic slang term from Taiwanese internet culture used to describe disordered or offbeat behavior—his work refracts the blurred boundaries between technological innovation and ethical ambiguity.
In 2024, Li was awarded the 8th Tung Chung Prize by the Hong Foundation and selected for residency at the prestigious Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands, and the recipient of the Hong Foundation Fellowship. He is also the recipient of the 2024 Golden Harvest Awards for Outstanding Short Films and the 2022 Taishin Visual Art Award. Currently based in Amsterdam, Li is developing new works commissioned by the Hong Foundation.
Presented in this mini-retrospective are three of Li’s formative works—*Rewiring* (2020), *howdoyouturnthison* (2021), and *What Is Your Favorite Primitive* (2023). Spanning digital technology, online information, and artificial intelligence, the artist employs a meta-narrative saturated with esoteric knowledge and personal ramblings to amalgamate the ideals and disillusionments of our technological revolution. This inquiry extends into his current work, where, amid the surging tide of the AI revolution, he attempts to articulate the existential dilemmas humanity faces in the wake of creating its own superego.
Making of…Li Yi-Fan：
HONG FOUNDATION X TAIPEI DANGDAI ── "Taipei Node"
Date｜2025/05/09 - 05/11(VIP Preview on May 8)
Venue｜Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas, 4F, Hall 1, Nangang Exhibition Center (No. 1, Jingmao 2nd Rd., Nangang District, Taipei)
Organizers｜Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas, Hong Foundation
Sponsor｜ Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government
Multimedia Equipment Support｜Hong Foundation, Panasonic Taiwan
Image｜Li Yi-Fan, What Is Your Favorite Primitive, 2023 (courtesy of the artist)
ARTIST
YI-FAN LI
Employing the forms of sculpture, painting and projection, Yi-Fan Li transformed his work into a fantastic narrative object lying fragmentary in the exhibition venue, a work bearing more than a passing resemblance to the detritus of bitter struggles. By observing these shattered remnants, the viewers may have a glimpse of the psychedelic space-time through which the artist has travelled; to wit, the emergence and disillusionment of desires.
Li formulated a meta-narrative concept by skillfully applying technological media such as projection mapping, making his work seemingly hesitate to move across the threshold of narratives and ergo mired in a state of constinuing preparation. Such “preparation” was rife with the frolic, wrestling and torture between the artist and the media he used. It was not until either party collapses that the work rose from the decaying corpse and then the narratives unfolded quietly. In this sense, what we see in Li’s work is not simply the narrative flow but also the ambiguous dimension acquired from the entanglements between his life stories and the media he adopted. In this dimension, time stops elapsing, Mercury is in retrograde motion, and all spoken words make no sense because they are blended with one another.
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