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2024
TUNG CHUNG PRIZE
TUNG CHUNG PRIZE
YI-FAN LI
2024/07/24
With a keen mastery of experimental spirit in visual creation and narrative tension, artist Yi-Fan Li has been awarded the 8th Hong Foundation “Tung Chung Prize” for 2024.
Hong Foundation will award a prize of one million NTD to recognize his artistic practice, which pioneers new possibilities in contemporary visual art through self-developed imaging technologies. Executive Director Grace Cheung stated: “Yi-Fan Li’s work is characterized by a distinctive narrative style, weaving the ideals and disillusions of the technological revolution into esoteric knowledge and personal ramblings. His works guide viewers to the blurred boundaries between the virtual and the real, as well as between technological tools and ethical ambiguity.”
The Tung Chung Prize, established and personally sponsored by the Hong Foundation’s honorary Chairman Celia Hong Chien Ching-Hui, aims to act as cultural venture capital, nurturing artists and creators at the early conceptual stage of their creative work. Since 2018, the prize has been awarded to artist Chia-Wei Hsu, Hsien-Yu Cheng, Pei-Ying Lin, and Musquiqui Chihying. This year’s recipient, Yi-Fan Li, remarked: “I am deeply grateful to the Hong Foundation for the Tung Chung Prize. For me, this represents a profoundly important recognition and support at this stage of my artistic career. In my upcoming works, I will continue to explore the relationship between contemporary technology and humanity.”
Following his receipt of the Taishin Visual Art Award in 2022, Yi-Fan Li went on to win the 2024 Golden Harvest Awards with his video work What Is Your Favorite Primitive. At the same time, he was also selected by the Rijksakademie this year and will depart for the Netherlands in September for a residency, further expanding his presence on the international stage.
Since 2019, Yi-Fan Li has been experimenting with visual creation through the use of game engines and real-time video. From important_message_360.mp4, which reflects on the human condition amid the explosion of information, to howdoyouturnthison, which, through the figure of a digital human, exposes the commodified nature underlying digital identities. In his latest work, Yi-Fan Li continues his exploration of the relationship between contemporary digital creator and creative software, focusing on several key directions, including: the shift in the relationship between creators and creative software, from ‘product consumers’ to ‘service users’; the built-in terms of use that accompany newly added AI-generative features in software; and the issues of ‘reduction’ arising from the feedback of big data.
With the spread of generative AI technologies and software, the essence of production tools is quietly changing, reshaping creators’ modes of production and stirring ethical debates. Yi-Fan Li, with his signature dark humor, guides the audience through waves of laughter and wry smiles, giving them emerging forms of biopolitics that are currently emerging or in the process of being reconstructed.
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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