{"id":1929260,"date":"2026-05-09T20:14:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T17:14:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1929260"},"modified":"2026-05-09T20:14:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T17:14:47","slug":"venice-biennale-offsite-highlights-fleshy-films-and-vegetarian-videos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1929260","title":{"rendered":"Venice Biennale Offsite Highlights: Fleshy Films and Vegetarian Videos"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_Li-Yi-Fan-Screen-Melancholy-screenshot-2026-60min-video-installation-Li-Yi-Fan.-Courtesy-of-the-artist-and-TFAM-of-Taiwan-Collateral-Event-2026.png?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cHow do you say \u2018bad luck\u2019 professionally in English?\u201d a naked CGI human with a Barbie crotch asks ChatGPT, speaking into their phone. Their body is covered in a messy layer of white paint, and their pupils have been erased, leaving them looking like a demented marble statue. \u201cInauspicious,\u201d the phone replies, as our protagonist charmingly stumbles through pronouncing it. They\u2019re asking because they want to deliver the bad news gently: \u201cIt is inauspicious to be born after 1989.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat I want to know\u2014and what ChatGPT cannot tell me\u2014is: what is the English word for the emotion Li Yi-Fan elicited in me with this animated video? Screen Melancholy<\/em> (2026), on view at the offsite Taiwan Pavilion in Venice, is chaotic and absurdist, uncanny and unhinged, creepy and hilarious. But the feeling it produces is more than the sum of its parts\u2014a totally fresh sensation. Beleaguered after three full days of Biennale-ing, it gave me new energy, a second wind.<\/p>\n

Screen Melancholy<\/em> has something of the uncanniness of an Ed Atkins video, the absurdism of skibidi toilet, and the \u201cstuplimity\u201d of a Ryan Trecartin work, to borrow Sianne Ngai\u2019s neologism for that sensorial state where shock and boredom fold into one another as overwhelming becomes the baseline. But Screen Melancholy<\/em> is also wholly its own thing. ArtReview <\/em>dubbed Li the \u201cpoet of enshittification.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the character morphs into an eye, then a prostate, then a heart, then an appendix, they ask us questions: \u201cHow\u2019s your relationship with all the images you\u2019ve ever seen?\u201d\u2014while offering something that feels truly unlike any of them. \u201cDo you know about animation?\u201d they ask. \u201cI can teach you, but I have to charge,\u201d they add, in an unforgettable voice. In one scene, the background switches to a desktop cluttered with dozens of saved pasta pictures<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFree charging in the Taiwan Pavilion!!!\u201d the painted figure announces while dancing. It\u2019s a small act of resistance: Technically, since China pressured the Biennale Foundation in 2003, the site is billed not as an official pavilion but as a collateral event organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Visitors lounge on benches shaped like arms and feet, with working phone chargers sticking out and here and there. Plug in\u2014but prepare for a silly scolding from the painted figure: \u201cWhy are you charging your phone in public space? It\u2019s gross!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI can\u2019t remember the last time I laughed so hard in an exhibition. I admit I was sometimes\u2014but not always\u2014the only person laughing in the packed pavilion. It\u2019s \u201ca real test for who finds it funny or just creepy,\u201d James McAnally of CounterPublic told me reassuringly.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a chance to see the work in the US, you can meet Li in St. Louis: curator Raphael Fonseca is bringing the artist to CounterPublic this September. Li is also in the current the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. I really can\u2019t recommend the work enough.<\/p>\n

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View of work by Janis Rafa in \u201cCanicula,\u201d a 2026 exhibition at Fondazione Between Art and Film, Venice.<\/span>Photo Emily Watlington<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAs it happens, two of my other favorite offsite works were fleshy films, even vegetarian videos. Thanks in no small part to dazling LED screens, video art is so back. The medium has struggled in recent years to distinguish itself from the endless short-form content flooding our phones, but giant LED screens have a way of merging with their surroundings, merging images with environments. Plus, they look incredible in a palazzo.<\/p>\n

\n\tFondazione In Between Art Film, at the Complesso dell\u2019Ospedaletto, features the best installation of video art I\u2019ve seen in years. I was mesmerized by Janis Rafa\u2019s Baby I\u2019m Yours, Forever<\/em> (2026). Scenes from an industrial meat refrigeration plant are rendered as haunting and surreal as they ought to be, though not through shock tactics or overt gore. In one sequence, a dangling skinned carcass cuts to a human figure contorted beyond anatomical recognition on a stripper pole: I think I saw a nipple on a shoulder blade, though I can\u2019t be sure. Elsewhere, milk pours down a staircase like a waterfall.<\/p>\n

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View of Lu Yang\u2019s exhibition \u201cDOKU The Illusion,\u201d 2026.<\/span>Photo Ludovica Arcero. Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe whole thing is mesmerizing and disgusting at once\u2014daring you to look away while luring you in closer\u2014like Cha\u00efm Soutine\u2019s horrified-yet-fascinated slaughterhouse carcasses, painted by a man who kept kosher. Rafa, a Greek artist whose practice often centers animal life, enlists disgust without turning it into moralism. I find meat disgusting both morally and materially, but her work doesn\u2019t preach, even if it hardly makes meat seem appetizing either.<\/p>\n

\n\tLu Yang, at Espace Louis Vuitton, offers a rejoinder to Li Yi-Fan\u2019s maximalism. Maybe in an era when we\u2019re all numbed by images, more is more. The Louis Vuitton store is no palazzo, but Lu Yang transforms it into a reflective chapel\u2014something like the inside of a lunchbox. A mirrored ceiling reflects the main event\u2014a video\u2014turning it into a kind of futuristic fresco.<\/p>\n

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Still from Lu Yang\u2019s film DOKU The Illusion, 2026.<\/em><\/em><\/span>Courtesy Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBuddhist meditations on attachment and desire overlay visuals that morph between anime, anatomy lesson, and music video, complete with an interior tour of the protagonist\u2019s torso before he breaks into dance wearing stunning red eyeshadow. Thoughts on karma punctuate a dancey sequence staged in the meat aisle of a grocery store, where some of the cutlets are labeled \u201chuman.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Iv\u00e1n Tovar: El Fuete Melancolico (The Melancholic Whip)<\/em>, 1969.<\/span>Photo Courtesy Fundaci\u00f3n Iv\u00e1n Tovar.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAll three exhibitions traffic in the surreal, but the final unmissable offsite show belongs to a capital-S Surrealist: Dominican painter Iv\u00e1n Tovar. His knockout paintings were a genuine revelation; I even prefer them to Wifredo Lam\u2019s. A century ago, as fascism rose and reality itself seemed to lose coherence, the Surrealists became the great painters of human-animal-object hybrids. It\u2019s easy to see why that sensibility has returned with such force today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/columns\/venice-diary-offsite-highlights-luyang-li-yi-fan-ivan-tovar-canicula-1234784846\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03_Li-Yi-Fan-Screen-Melancholy-screenshot-2026-60min-video-installation-Li-Yi-Fan.-Courtesy-of-the-artist-and-TFAM-of-Taiwan-Collateral-Event-2026.png?w=1024″] \u201cHow do you say \u2018bad luck\u2019 professionally in English?\u201d a naked CGI human with a Barbie crotch asks ChatGPT, speaking into their phone. Their body is covered in a messy layer of white paint, and their pupils have been erased, leaving them looking like a demented marble statue. \u201cInauspicious,\u201d the phone replies, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1929260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1929260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1929260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1929260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1929260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}