Taiwanese artist Li Yi-Fan, born in 1989 and based between Taipei and Amsterdam, creates unsettling digital marionettes using modified game engines and digital puppetry. His pale, chalky figures with uncanny proportions discuss voyeurism, sexual fantasies, philosophy, memes, and computer programming, often resembling the artist himself. Li works a nine-to-five schedule, spends hours on computer games as research, and describes himself as 'probably the most boring artist.' His practice relies on free or subscription software and purchased digital assets, staging what it feels like to make digital art within platform systems and corporate infrastructure.
Li's work matters because it offers a rare insider critique of the digital image-world from within its own machinery. He terms his approach the 'workaround'—a slightly derogatory programming term for a solution that routes around a problem rather than solving it—which he sees as the only honest position available for artists today. By using industrial avatars and corporate tools to examine voyeurism and digital experience, Li Yi-Fan exemplifies a generation of artists grappling with the tension between creative expression and the platforms that enable and constrain it.