An Interview with Li Yi Fan

In the Taipei Biennial 2023, Li Yi-Fan’s work What Is Your Favorite Primitive employs a semi-autobiographical narrative method to explore the relationship between video production tools and people. How do the complex social and ethical issues arising from the interplay between users and makers affect the way we communicate? And how can software tools convey emotions that transcend individual feelings and perceptions? This work’s intimately detailed plot depicts human life and death, constructing a new politics of life with a unique aesthetic vocabulary. The artist spoke with curator Freya Chou about the influence of his childhood experiences on how he makes images and his subsequent creative path.

FC: The theme of this Biennial, “Small World,” is based on the concept of scale. Your work employs quite an extreme form of compression: you chose a production model very different from the large industrial scales required for films or video games. In your production process, you recreated all your digital moving images in your own studio. That seems incredible! How did you transform a collective, decentralized image production process into an individual DIY artwork?

LYF: When you first told me the exhibition would be about the concept of scale, that happened to be a subject I had been thinking about for quite a while: how I as an independent individual could fight the film industry. Actually, in the beginning I wanted to make movies. But I don’t like to bother other people. I’m very reserved. Even now, I’m a little embarrassed to ask my assistant to lend me a hand. So, my current situation actually comes from my background and the way I was raised.. And also, I’m a control freak. I like to handle things on my own. So when I pondered the possibility of a one-person film, I decided to harness the power of technology and use technological mass production to accomplish things that usually require a lot of manpower.

This thought process over the past two to three years led me to a change in mindset. At first, when I was producing a work, I found that I was endowed with enormous power—as if I was omnipotent. All I needed was to be able to write a software program, and I could do anything. But creating my work for the Taipei Biennial made me realize that actually I can’t escape large-scale manufacturing. In the past I used guerrilla tactics to hop from one industrially produced software program to another. So in What Is Your Favorite Primitive, it becomes more and more obvious what my relationship with these software programs or industries is—I seem to have all-powerful abilities, but in the end I still must comply with the rules of their production conditions. This made me think more deeply. I seem to have circumvented the multileveled hierarchy of filmmaking, but I was still stuck inside a set of specifications.

FC: That is to say, you attempted to alter the structure of production by resisting it in terms of form, but to a certain degree, you discovered that you ultimately couldn’t free yourself from big industry. It still surrounds you layer by layer.

LYF: My works always consider the struggle between cyborgs and naturalism. I could choose to reject all software and return to the state of primitive humans, to start from scratch with basic-level coding. But then I would also lose all the advantages of today’s technology.

FC: On first viewing I felt like the work might belong to a tradition of the grotesque or body horror. But then again, to an extent, the distortions of the body are presented with such calmness and clarity that one can feel visceral horror or even revulsion or disgust. How did you address the presentation of the human form? 

LYF: My starting point was very simple. I wanted to create motion within a digital environment. In the past, animation used key frames. You would keyframe every action one by one. But I don’t have the patience for that. I wondered if it was possible to create a performance using the more high-tech method of motion capture. But given my financial situation, I couldn’t afford to do a sophisticated performance. Only an animation studio with the entire gamut of technology can do that. So I used a very rough-hewn approach, with just a few basic pieces of equipment. The figures you see in my work weren’t really acted out by me; they were puppets I manipulated. And the weird bodily contortions actually came about because I was unable to manipulate the puppets with precision. Most puppeteers stand behind their puppets, but I stood in front of mine. This experience came from when I used to play with toys as a kid, and I would play with them face-to-face, inventing dialogues and performances by myself. That’s why it evolved into the deformed contortions you see today. But this deformity also accidentally resulted in a half-readymade, imperfect performative motion.

FC: So your current aesthetic expression arises from inferior technology. But paradoxically, at the outset you hoped to resist big industry by relying on your own powers, yet you discovered you were very limited and accidentally created a half-readymade aesthetic language. I think your entire creative process aligns well with the Taiwanese spirit. You started out feeling bashful, and due to a lack of material resources, you eventually created a “makeshift aesthetic.”

LYF: You could also call it “work around.” This is a specialized term in software programming. When you can’t solve something, you circumnavigate or piece parts together. This phrase is derogatory—resorting to the rough-hewn approach I talked about earlier, when searching for a solution.

FC: When I watched your video, I felt a rather jarring contrast between what feels like a very intimate, personal narrative and a visual language that I associate with the impersonal space of video game design or commercial animation. In what ways is this a personal, expressive work？Do we actually gain insight into you as a person?

LYF: My artworks have always started with myself. This may have something to do with how I grew up. I didn’t have any siblings, so I always played by myself as a child. Playing with toys as a kid is a form of narrative development, a conversation with yourself. So my art is basically an extension of my childhood experience of playing with Legos. But this personal experience is not important to viewers at all. I’m making use of technology to invite them into my world. It’s like I’m giving them a gift, and I’m enticing them to open it using beautiful packaging. The packaging is technology, and I’m wrapping my personal story in it. But for the viewer, the enjoyment doesn’t come from what’s wrapped up inside, but from the unpacking process.

FC: Sometimes digital art that includes human figures falls into the famous “uncanny valley.” Is that a territory that you aimed to explore with this work? 

LYF: The characters I create are me. It’s hard to separate the two. But lately I’ve often been asked if I use my art to deal with psychological issues or use it as an emotional outlet. At the moment of creation, I’m not thinking about it all that much. But after the fact, I think about it in more detail, and it seems this possibility does exist. I have a strong desire to express myself. And I make use of surrogates to help me process this desire, so I can achieve it in a relaxed way.

FC: I also want to raise a point that might seem counter-intuitive. This work feels strongly humanist to me. I say that because digital artists at this moment are often wrapped up in the financial world (crypto) or locked in some kind of struggle with AI (their work threatened with being made obsolete by this technology). Yet AI could never in a million years develop anything as authentically weird as what you’ve produced. And I would characterize the difference as “humanity.” It’s something that might explain why this work has connected so strongly with many viewers. If this makes sense to you, I wonder if you’ve thought about the difference between what’s “weird” about your work and the kind of “weird” that’s possible with AI? 

Li: That’s a huge question. For this Taipei Biennial, my work has already begun to delve at least partly into the relationship between AIartificial intelligence and image production tools, and my next work will explore it in even greater depth. I think this question comes back to the differences between humans and AI and their definitions. Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether AI really understands language, since it possesses a language model and it can chat fluidly. This is a very major point of debate right now. But we could also ask, do we humans really understand language? Or are we just engaging in logical deduction like AI? At this moment in time, the difference between AI and me is a sense of humor. AI can’t perform logical reasoning about jokes yet, and that’s currently the biggest difference between humans and machines. So I really care about using humor to soften up some tough questions. That’s my own strategy.

FC: If AI could write jokes one day, I think that would be terrifying.

Li: Or if you saw a dog laugh at you with a sense of humor, if they learned a certain trait that is distinctly human, that would be really scary too.

FC: Can you reveal how the development of AI will figure in your next work?

LYF: I’ve always been curious about the tension between cyborgs and naturalism, which we mentioned earlier. I think AI is an unavoidable problem. In my work for this Taipei Biennial, I addressed this a little bit. When a tool contains AI, it includes complex specifications that constrain how you use that AI tool. This is a new concept for me: when a tool incorporates regulations for its own use. It’s like buying a hammer but no one tells you not to hit someone with it; instead, there is a “law” that keeps you from hitting people with the hammer. And yet, right now the trend in AI is for it to contain its own restrictions. My next work will be about the problem of regulating artificial intelligence, because it’s similar to the restrictions I’ve received about putting lurid content in my art. It’s as if my creative freedom is being regulated. But now the tools themselves engage in self-censorship. They directly prohibit you from producing lurid content. So my next work will focus on the relationship between AI and people. AI offers a lot of possibilities as a new creative tool, but many forms of surveillance and control have emerged within it that are invisible. I intend to start out from the perspective of the history of photography or the history of painting and explore the panics or prohibitions people faced back when those media were new.

FC: Did any other works in the Biennial resonate powerfully with you?

LYFi: I really liked Spencer Yeh’s 123 Trailers for Spectacle. The inspiration for my films comes mostly from B movies, so his work really struck a chord with me. And it stirred a new passion for cinema in me. I had gradually come to lose interest in movies, and it had been a long time since I had watched movies intensively. But his work reignited a desire to hunt down every one of those films and watch them. To a certain extent, we both had very similar starting points. B movies are images with a very strong sense of medium, because they don’t let you grasp the storyline right away—you have to keep waiting until the end. So they’re very good at manifesting the special characteristics of film as a medium. What makes 123 Trailers for Spectacle so interesting is that it uses other people’s materials, but it’s very punctilious about the pacing of the images and the musical accompaniment. It more or less reassembles other people’s works. It’s also a quite rough-hewn conceptual approach.

Translated by Brent Heinrich