Li Yi-Fan and Chang Yung-Ta

These twinned solo shows by Taiwanese artists born in the eighties, co-curated by Sarah Caillet and Martin Guinard, present mirror images of the perception-altering effects of technology. Li Yi-Fan’s “Last Warning,” which brings together recent videos and installations rooted in online culture and cutting-edge gaming software, is marked by its frenetic pace and unsettling imagery. Zombie snails, corpselike avatars, pop-up adverts, psy-ops, and puppeteers are mashed together in lurid, virtuosic animations that capture the apocalyptic mood—and visual slop—of the incipient AI era. If this memorably disturbing show feels designed to unsettle and provoke, then Chang Yung-Ta’s “Echoes of Silence” has a contrastingly soothing, even balm-like quality. His precise sculptures and installations, made using water, vapor, stone, and scientific equipment, render visible forces so subtle they cannot be perceived through the senses without the aid of technology: radiation, cosmic rays, the infinitesimally gradual erosion of marble stones on unseen stream beds. Chang’s concern is not the superabundance of information but its apparent absence.

Despite the obvious dissimilarities in these artists’ work, technology is central to both of their practices as tool and theme. They each grapple with vast, often intangible unknowns—the internet, weather, time—in which individuals are enmeshed and which exceed their mortal and sensory limits. If the title of Li’s “Last Warning” evokes apocalyptic reckoning, a world on the brink of catastrophe, it also points to exhaustion: for there to have been a last one, several prior warnings must have been ignored. In these complex, technically impressive films and installations, Li, who will represent Taiwan at next year’s Venice Biennale, positions himself as both maker and made, puppeteer and puppet—even jailer and inmate. Technology here emerges as a deeply ambivalent force, empowering its users while at the same time trapping them in convoluted, panoptical prisons.

The video installation Important_Message.MP4 (2019–20) is an almost complete 360-degree halo of LED screens that floods the viewer with sound and light. The work examines how misinformation spreads and mutates through the metaphor of “zombie snails” infected with parasitic flatworms. Narrated by sweating, grinning avatars voiced by the artist, it is replete with salacious images—chastity belts, psychoactive drugs, bodybuilding, emojis—that multiply across the screen. The cumulative effect of this relentlessly heightened work is akin to semantic satiation: an important message repeated so relentlessly that it begins to lose meaning.

This potential for numbness—or self-protective mindlessness—may be the most astute and unsettling effect of the work. References to “brainwashing in China,” meanwhile, hint that the idea that technology can “rewrite the human brain,” as Li puts it in the film, has a specific and urgent resonance. According to the Varieties of Democracy project, at the University of Gothenburg, Taiwan receives more disinformation from foreign sources than any other democratic country, undermining its government and fomenting division between Taiwan and its allies. This has been the case for more than a decade.1

If misinformation is a parasitic worm, which threatens to turn its citizens into zombie snails, then the installation Boring Grey (2021–25) might be the worm’s fully evolved form. Projected onto gloopy cut-outs are animated mouths, eyes, and lights that flash and shiver, suggesting individual agency has been subsumed into an incoherent mass, a suppurating fatberg of digitized body-parts. Meanwhile, What is Your Favorite Primitive (2023), a 37-minute video set in a decayed cinema strewn with rubbish, echoes Ryan Trecartin’s work in its blurring of staged party, video performance, and video manipulation.

This self-reflexive video charts Li’s relationship with technology, including the Unreal game engine. In the age of “enshittification,” prosumer software locks its users into expensive subscription plans; at the same time, it allows Li to improvise performances in real time, lending the video its gonzo intensity. Grinding noises, metallic clangs, and microphone feedback add to the sense of foreboding, while scatological humor (at one point, a Li-avatar talks out of his anus) spills into slapstick violence. Figures kneeling in a row are “executed” with a bonk on the head by a baseball bat. In a moment of eerie quiet, an avatar swings on the end of a rope, legs pedaling mid-air. This harrowing image evokes both the horrors of real-world violence and the edgelord humor deployed online by trolls. Li’s work suggests that the two are linked.

Chang’s “Echoes of Silence,” shown in the other half of this evenly divided museum, does not turn up the volume of the noise so much as comb it for hidden signals. The predominant colors of this delicate, lyrical show are black and white, while Li’s chattering avatars have given way to a drone-like soundscape of ambient music and murmuring machines. The installation Without Composing_no1 [ver 2] (2023) is the mirror-image of Li’s Important_Message.MP4. This near-complete circle of Gieger-Müller counters are arranged evenly in a curving wall and click whenever they detect radiation; together, they blend to something like the sound of cicadas at night. The work imbues a ubiquitous but typically undetectable force with felt presence, even character.

Chang began using these instruments in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011. But as other works in the show further demonstrate, radiation is not just limited to nuclear exclusion zones. Without Composing_no5 (2023) comprises boxes resembling Hantarex monitors in size and shape. Their screens shiver with real-time animations akin to mist or sea-spray. These register the radiation emitted by minerals embedded in pieces of stone contained within each piece, again picked up by Geiger-Müller counters. The work reframes these static, solid objects as the origins of unpredictable energies, suggesting the material world is more dynamic, and less dependable, then our senses lead us to believe.

The largest room contains the installation scape.unseen-model T [ver. 1.2] (2025). This “landscape factory,” as Chang describes it, consists of tall, freestanding tubes in which discs of granite are being eroded, over the course of the exhibition, by glass beads submerged in water that churns at the rate of currents recorded by scientists in Liwu River in Taiwan. Among the invisible forces of interest to Chang is time, particularly that of geological and cosmic scales that exceed the human lifespan. If Li envisions a world defiled by misinformation, super-saturated to the point of an imminent-seeming implosion, Chang’s work feels more elegiac. The forces that surround us, whose influence we rarely detect, will outlive us.