Taiwan artist and filmmaker Li Yi-Fan has won the Golden Harvest Award at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival for his short film What Is Your Favourite Primitive (2023), which narrates the push and pulls between artist and kinds of image production tools as well as the ethical questions that arise in the process. Selected among a longlist of 66 films from a total of 344 submissions, Li’s nomination is the first experimental film to receive the award of NTD5,400,000 (USD166,000) and a Sony camera.
‘I never expected that the Golden Harvest Award would be awarded to an experimental film. This event means a lot to me,’ Li said. ‘It reminded me of the experimental film lecture of the Golden Harvest Award that I accidentally attended when I was in college 15 years ago, which made me devote myself to the creation of experimental films.’
Born in Taipei in 1989, Li received his MA in New Media Art at the National Taiwan University of Art and a BFA from National Taiwan Normal University. His works have previously been shown at at Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei and the Taipei Fine Art Museum, where What Is Your Favourite Primitive was screened in the 13th Taipei Biennial, Small World.