In Li Yi-Fan’s untitled video installation, showing at the Rijksakademie – seen as part of the Rijksakademie Open Studios during Amsterdam Art Week –  the artist draws on the spirit and aesthetics of the Japanese practice of Butoh to stage a digitally mediated performance of uncanny, embodied dislocation. The film features an AI body applying makeup to an already whitened face, in an echo of the art form’s use of white body makeup, while a floppy “robot” body appears on the ground next to the video. It does not move, but its presence is nonetheless theatrical: like a fallen performer, it exists in limbo between object and body, real and simulacrum. It is not the body in the film but a foil meant to invoke embodiment through its absence. This dummy becomes a prop of misdirection, a silent performer in a kind of digital Butoh, by resisting narrative, resisting legibility, transforming the self through ambiguity.

Li Yi-Fan is an artist who describes his practice as “staging a death match between artist and software until a narrative work quietly unfolds from the decaying corpse of their confrontation.” Developing his own software tools for video production and incorporating a video game engine that allows him to improvise in real time with detailed 3D animations, Li reflects on the detailed desires that arise from increasingly complex technical tools. Narrated by sweating, grinning avatars voiced by the artist, his video work What is your Favorite Primitive (2023) is replete with lurid images – chastity belts, psychoactive drugs, bodybuilding, emojis – that multiply across the screen. 

Technology is central as both a tool and theme as. the film’s ghoulish figures grapple with vast intangible unknowns – the internet, weather, time – in which individuals are enmeshed, and which exceed their mortal and sensory limits. Exhaustion is a function of the work, and this potential for numbness – or self-protective mindlessness – may be one of its most astute and unsettling effects. Yet, amid the bleakness, there is dark humour. Li’s work reimagines the chaotic visual residue of the emergent AI age, finding irony and absurdity in the aesthetic wreckage. Set to represent Taiwan at the upcoming Venice Biennale, Li’s work captures how rapidly evolving technology can rewire not only our tools but our minds – how the deluge of imagery reshapes communication, memory and the self. In What is your Favorite Primitive and across Li’s work, we witness not just the spectacle of digital disruption, but its psychic fallout: a surreal meditation on our slow drift into the algorithmic unknown. .