“How do you say ‘bad luck’ professionally in English?” 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. “Inauspicious,” the phone replies, as our protagonist charmingly stumbles through pronouncing it. They’re asking because they want to deliver the bad news gently: “It is inauspicious to be born after 1989.” What I want to know—and what ChatGPT cannot tell me—is: what is the English word for the emotion Li Yi-Fan elicited in me with this animated video? Screen Melancholy (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—a totally fresh sensation. Beleaguered after three full days of Biennale-ing, it gave me new energy, a second wind.…