“How do you say ‘dangerous luck’ professionally in English?” a unadorned CGI human with a Barbie crotch asks ChatGPT, talking into their cellphone. Their physique is roofed in a messy layer of white paint, and their pupils have been erased, leaving them wanting like a demented marble statue. “Inauspicious,” the cellphone replies, as our protagonist charmingly stumbles by way of saying it. They’re asking as a result of they wish to ship the dangerous information gently: “It’s inauspicious to be born after 1989.”
What I wish to know—and what ChatGPT can’t inform me—is: what’s the English phrase for the emotion Li Yi-Fan elicited in me with this animated video? Display Melancholy (2026), on view on the offsite Taiwan Pavilion in Venice, is chaotic and absurdist, uncanny and unhinged, creepy and hilarious. However the feeling it produces is greater than the sum of its elements—a very recent sensation. Beleaguered after three full days of Biennale-ing, it gave me new power, a second wind.
Display Melancholy has one thing of the uncanniness of an Ed Atkins video, the absurdism of skibidi rest room, and the “stuplimity” of a Ryan Trecartin work, to borrow Sianne Ngai’s neologism for that sensorial state the place shock and tedium fold into each other as overwhelming turns into the baseline. However Display Melancholy can be wholly its personal factor. ArtReview dubbed Li the “poet of enshittification.”
Because the character morphs into an eye fixed, then a prostate, then a coronary heart, then an appendix, they ask us questions: “How’s your relationship with all the photographs you’ve ever seen?”—whereas providing one thing that feels actually not like any of them. “Have you learnt about animation?” they ask. “I can educate you, however I’ve to cost,” delivered in an unforgettable voice. In a single scene, the background switches to a desktop cluttered with dozens of saved pasta footage
“Free charging within the Taiwan Pavilion!!!” the painted determine broadcasts whereas dancing. It’s a small act of resistance: Technically, since China pressured the Biennale Basis in 2003, the location is billed not as an official pavilion however as a collateral occasion organized by the Taipei Advantageous Arts Museum. Guests lounge on benches formed like arms and toes, with working cellphone chargers protruding and right here and there. Plug in—however put together for a foolish scolding from the painted determine: “Why are you charging your cellphone in public house? It’s gross!”
I can’t bear in mind the final time I laughed so exhausting in an exhibition. I admit I used to be generally—however not at all times—the one particular person laughing within the packed pavilion. It’s “an actual take a look at for who finds it humorous or simply creepy,” James McAnally of CounterPublic informed me reassuringly.
For an opportunity to see the work within the US, you may meet it in St. Louis: curator Raphael Fonseca is bringing Li to CounterPublic this September. The artist can be within the present the Carnegie Worldwide in Pittsburgh. I actually can’t suggest it sufficient.
View of labor by Janis Rafa in “Canicula,” a 2026 exhibition at Fondazione Between Artwork and Movie, Venice.
Photograph Emily Watlington
Because it occurs, two of my different favourite offsite works have been fleshy movies, even vegetarian movies. Thanks in no small half to LED screens, video artwork is so again. The medium has struggled lately to differentiate itself from the limitless short-form content material flooding our telephones, however big LED screens have a means of merging with their environment, turning pictures into environments. Plus, they give the impression of being unbelievable in a palazzo.
Fondazione In Between Artwork Movie, on the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, options the most effective set up of video artwork I’ve seen in years. I used to be mesmerized by Janis Rafa’s Child I’m Yours, Ceaselessly (2026). Scenes from an industrial meat refrigeration plant are rendered as haunting and surreal as they must be, although not by way of shock ways or overt gore. In a single sequence, a dangling skinned carcass cuts to a human determine contorted past anatomical recognition on a stripper pole: I believe I noticed a nipple on a shoulder blade, although I can’t make certain. Elsewhere, milk pours down a staircase like a waterfall.
View of Lu Yang’s exhibition “DOKU The Phantasm,” 2026.
Photograph Ludovica Arcero. Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia.
The entire thing is mesmerizing and disgusting directly—daring you to look away whereas luring you in nearer—like Chaïm Soutine’s horrified-yet-fascinated slaughterhouse carcasses, painted by a person who saved kosher. Rafa, a Greek artist whose observe typically facilities animal life, understands disgust with out turning it into moralism. I discover meat disgusting each morally and materially, however her work doesn’t preach, even when it hardly makes meat appear appetizing both.
Lu Yang, at Espace Louis Vuitton, gives a rejoinder to Li Yi-Fan’s maximalism. Perhaps in an period after we’re all numbed by pictures, extra is extra. The Louis Vuitton retailer isn’t any palazzo, however Lu Yang transforms it right into a reflective chapel—one thing like the within of a lunchbox. A mirrored ceiling displays the principle occasion—a video—turning it right into a sort of futuristic fresco.
Nonetheless from Lu Yang’s movie DOKU The Phantasm, 2026.
Courtesy Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia
Buddhist meditations on attachment and need overlay visuals that morph between anime, anatomy lesson, and music video, full with an inside tour of the protagonist’s torso earlier than he breaks into dance carrying gorgeous purple eyeshadow. Ideas on karma punctuate a dancey sequence staged within the meat aisle of a grocery retailer, the place a few of the cutlets are labeled “human.”
Iván Tovar: El Fuete Melancolico (The Melancholic Whip), 1969.
Photograph Courtesy Fundación Iván Tovar.
All three exhibitions site visitors within the surreal, however the closing unmissable offsite present belongs to a capital-S Surrealist: Dominican painter Iván Tovar. His knockout work have been a real revelation; I even favor them to Wifredo Lam’s. A century in the past, as fascism rose and actuality itself appeared to lose coherence, the Surrealists grew to become the good painters of human-animal-object hybrids. It’s simple to see why that sensibility has returned with such pressure as we speak.
