Speaker: Gabriel Remy-Handfield, Research Assistant Professor, Academy of Language and Culture, Hong Kong Baptist University
Moderator: Arnika Fuhrmann, Professor, Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109028
All are welcome. Registration is required.
This talk introduces the media art practice of emerging Taiwanese artist Li Yi-Fan (1989–). Inspired by video games, Internet culture, science fiction, and horror, Li constructs a bizarre universe using machinima and self-developed game engines to interrogate our troubled relationships with digital technologies. Performing through an abject, grotesque avatar that acts as his double, the artist stages a form of digital puppetry that exposes the absurdities of contemporary digital life.
My talk is divided into two parts. First, I illuminate Li’s aesthetic influences by tracing a genealogical lineage through three key elements: Hans Bellmer’s Surrealist dolls, which establish a visual vocabulary of anatomical deformation and the grotesque; Tony Oursler’s uncanny projected video-sculptures; and Teri Silvio’s concept of ang-a, a uniquely Taiwanese mode of animation grounded in puppet theater. This framework situates Li’s practice within the ecology of contemporary visual culture, performance, and animation theory.
The second part offers close readings of howdoyouturnthison (2021) and Rewiring (2020) with the goal of addressing the following questions: how does the artist’s manipulation and control of virtual bodies reveal a form of uncanniness specific to our technologically mediated environment? How does he propose a new visualization of the digital body? I examine how Li’s digital doubles become a site of abnormal corporeality. Drawing on Shane Denson’s theories of discorrelated-images and abject cringe, I argue that Li produces what I term as the speculative uncanny—an aesthetic modality in which the virtual body is rendered unfamiliar and strange through real-time computational imaging.
Gabriel Remy-Handfield is a Research Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he is affiliated with the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Montreal, where his doctoral dissertation focused on media artist LuYang. Previously, he was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University, China Centre in the World. His research spans East and Southeast Asian literature, cinema, and digital art, with a particular focus on queer and psychoanalytic theories, posthumanism, and speculative fiction. Gabriel’s work has been published in journals such as Screen Bodies, the Journal of Chinese Film Studies, and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His forthcoming projects include a co-edited book on LuYang with Livia Monnet, and a publication on media artist Li Yi-Fan for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.
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