Discorrelated Images, Weirdness, and Abject Cringe in Li Yi-Fan’s Digital Art

Li Yi-Fan (李亦凡) (1989–), a multi-award-winning artist is fascinated by the creative process of digital image-making and the complex interplay between humans and technology. Drawing on influences from science fiction and video games, Li employs machinima, motion capture, and virtual reality to construct unconventional, experimental narratives. His 2021 film, howdoyouturnthison, leverages these tools to probe—often in intuitive, unsettling ways—the limits and potential of the digital image. howdoyouturnthison deploys absurdist puppetry through digital animation to evoke both uncanny, weird, and cringe-inducing effects. Li’s digital avatar contort strangely within a deserted virtual apartment, meandering through illogical narratives and disquieting digital reflections that unsettle the viewer’s expectations of digital embodiment. This visual and narrative strangeness actively invokes the “weird” in Mark Fisher’s sense, cultivating an ontological ambiguity and estrangement, while simultaneously evoking what Shane Denson terms as “abject cringe”—an affective response marked by fascination and visceral discomfort, typical of contemporary encounters with AI and algorithmic media. Li’s investigation into awkwardness and weirdness in digital culture is further exemplified in his work Rewiring, which examines the underground phenomenon of “tea-bagging” in video games—a performative, often provocative gesture that blurs the lines between humor, aggression, and cringe. This paper draws on Fisher’s theorization of the weird, Denson’s concepts of discorrelated-images and abject cringe, and Deleuze’s consideration on sense and non-sense to better understand the artist aesthetic. Together, these frameworks illuminate how Li Yi-Fan’s work destabilizes boundaries of identity and technological agency in post-cinematic media art.