Screen Melancholy (2026) examines the often invisible systems through which images shape perception, experience, and contemporary subjectivity. Developed using a game engine, that Li Yi Fan himself built and coded, the film unfolds as a layered meditation on image production, tracing the relationship between maker, tool, and viewer. Rather than treating digital technologies as neutral instruments, the work proposes that tools do not simply facilitate representations of the world but actively constitute the world itself. The technical frameworks through which images are generated determine what can be seen, imagined, and ultimately believed.

Structured through multiple narrative registers, the film presents an artist who constructs a character that, in turn, teaches the viewer how to make animation. This recursive chain of maker, making a maker, making something becomes a metaphor for the production of knowledge itself, exposing the hidden mechanisms through which images acquire authority. Tutorial videos, philosophical reflection, and digital animation collapse into one another, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish instruction from performance, truth from fabrication.

Throughout the work, puppetry functions as a central metaphor for the operation of power. Just as a puppet appears animated while its movements remain governed by concealed forces, contemporary image-making technologies direct perception through underlying technical systems that largely escape attention. Models, masks, keyframes, rendering engines, and algorithmic processes silently prescribe the conditions through which images, and by extension, reality are produced. These infrastructures become invisible precisely because of their familiarity.

The grotesque and unsettling avatar in the work heightens the attention given to these dynamics. Moving between humour, unease, and self-reflexive parody, the characters and the world they simultaneously build and inhabit reveal that power does not merely reside in images themselves but in the tools, protocols, and interfaces that produce them. By making visible the layered processes of construction, the film invites viewers to reconsider the seductive illusion of technological neutrality. In exposing how worlds are assembled through prescriptive systems of image production, the work suggests that understanding the mechanics behind images is essential to understanding the structures of power that increasingly organise contemporary life.

Sound Design: Hung Tzu-Ni, Mothra Productions
3D Assisting: Jeci Chen, Su Po-Jui
Illustration: Yen Yu-Ting

Commissioned by Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Preliminary research supported by Hong Foundation