Tsai Ming-liang

by

Beth Tsai

• LAST REVIEWED: 15 September 2023
• LAST MODIFIED: 22 November 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0289

Introduction

Tsai Ming-liang (b. 1957) is a Taiwan-based, Malaysia-born filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the Second Wave directors of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, following precursors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Chen Kunhou. His films Vive L’Amour (1994), The River (1997), The Wayward Cloud (2005), and Stray Dogs (2013) have successively won, respectively, the Golden Lion Prize at the Venice Film Festival, the Grand Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, the Silver Bear Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival. He has been the recipient of five FIPRESCI Prizes, which are voted on by the International Federation of Film Critics. His first virtual reality film, The Home at Lan Re Temple (2017), was shortlisted for the VR competition at the 74th Venice Film Festival in 2017. During the last decade or so, his work has extended from feature-length works to short art films and installations, such as It’s a Dream (2007), Erotic Space (2010), The Theater in the Boiler Room (2011), and the Walker series (to date, ten short films made between 2012 and 2024). In 2009 his work Visage was commissioned by the Louvre Museum and became the first entry in the “The Louvre Invites Filmmakers” collection. Tsai is also a filmmaker with multiple identities. As an auteur, he tends to work with a set group of actors, especially with his muse, Lee Kang-sheng, who stars in all of Tsai’s features. His films are also known for their queer sensibility. As a director heavily invested in gay subjectivity, his films offer thematic representations of emotions and desires, and they focus principally on urban loneliness, cruising, and melancholy. He tends to explore moral boundaries in his films, especially with sexual taboos that made the director one of the most controversial figures within Taiwanese cinema. In addition, Tsai is a leading figure who contributes to the art of slow cinema. His signature style of long takes, long shots, and minimal dialogue can be seen as a formal representation of the postmodern condition and displacement. His later films and installations are seen as the ultimate exploration of pure cinematic form, a departure from his early focus on postcolonial Taipei and its social critique.

General Overviews

In the 1990s and early 2000s, most of the sources on Tsai Ming-liang were in Chinese or they were Tsai’s writings on his films. Over time, the scholarship in English has expanded. Lim 2014 is the first academic monograph in English dedicated to Tsai, followed by de Villiers 2022 eight years later, while Joyard, et al. 1999 is the first book-length study of the director. Sing 2014 is the first Chinese monograph that situates Tsai’s films and installations in the art history context, whereas Wen Tian-xiang, a longtime film critic and scholar from Taiwan, offers both a personal and a distinct view on the trajectory of Tsai’s filmography in Wen 2002. Comparably, New York film critic Nick Pinkerton carefully studies and offers a thoughtful meditation on the closing movie theater in Goodbye, Dragon Inn and the changing future for the art form of cinema in Pinkerton 2021. Other successive constellations of insight in the form of book chapters, including Chang 2023, Ma 2022, Hong 2011, and Yeh and Davis 2005, focus on the recurring themes, motifs, meta-narrative, and slow aesthetics in Tsai’s films.

• Chang, Hsiao-Hung 張小虹. The Face of Cinema （電影的臉）. Taipei: Reading Times, 2023.

  The author meditates on the philosophical dimensions of Stray Dogs (2013), Journey to the West (2014), Visage (2009), and Your Face (2018), revisiting contemporary film theories and concepts in two chapters of this book.

• de Villiers, Nicholas. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

  Currently the latest monograph on the auteur, de Villiers offers an exhilarating and comprehensive reading of Tsai’s oeuvre to date, encompassing both feature-length films and gallery installations. In this book, the author contends the queerness of Tsai’s films extends beyond the representation of same-sex desire.

• Hong, Guo-Juin. “Anywhere but Here: The Postcolonial City in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Taipei Trilogy.” In Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen. By Guo-Juin Hong, 159–181. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

  DOI: 10.1057/9780230118324_8

  This book chapter examines Tsai’s Taipei trilogy—Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive L’Amour (1994), and The River (1997). In addition to analyzing Tsai’s ahistorical representation of Taipei city and the postcolonial conditions of Taiwan, the author situates Tsai’s films in the historicity of Taiwan New Cinema.

• Joyard, Olivier, Jean-Pierre Rehm, and Danièle Rivière. Tsai Ming-liang. Paris: Dis Voir, 1999.

  This book contains two parts: a compilation of critical essays that examine key elements of Tsai’s cinema, and an extended interview with the director, discussing his influences, themes, and work.

• Lim, Song Hwee. Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014.

  DOI: 10.21313/hawaii/9780824836849.001.0001

  This book offers an overview of the theoretical terrain of temporality, defines the aesthetics of slow cinema, and address Tsai’s films as a site that mediates between stillness and movement. One of the most compelling components from this book is the use of ASL (average shot length) statistical data to support the author’s discussions on the duration and temporality in Tsai’s films.

• Ma, Jean. At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022.

  DOI: 10.1525/luminos.132

  In two chapters, Ma draws parallels between the films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai, frequently discussed together in the context of slow cinema. Ma explores how sleeping bodies were portrayed on screen and the digital turn to incorporate sleep as part of the audience’s experience, specifically, in the site-specific exhibitions of SLEEPCNEMAHOTEL and Stray Dogs at the Museum.

• Pinkerton, Nick. Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Berlin: Fireflies Press, 2021.

  A book-length, elegiac essay that is part of a series that focuses on only one film at a time. In this booklet, Pinkerton reads how Tsai’s film evokes broader implications of cultural memory of movie-watching. Apart from exploring its cinematic techniques and narrative choices, the writer contemplates the movie theater space and the collective movie-going rituals and offers a personal reflection on the trajectory of cinema and the digital impact on screen culture.

• Sing Song-yong 孫松榮. Projecting Tsai Ming-liang: Towards Transart Cinema (入鏡｜出境：蔡明亮的影像藝術與跨界實踐). Taipei: Wunan, 2014.

  This book looks over Tsai’s shift of practice: from television to film, from feature films to installations, and from the movie theater to the art museum. The writings draw upon subjects such as modernism, the death of cinema, and post-medium border crossing. This book also includes an extended interview with the director.

• Wen Tian-xiang 聞天祥. Freeze-Frame in Light and Shadow: The Spiritual Site of Tsai Ming-liang (光影定格：蔡明亮的心靈場域). Taipei: Hengxing, 2002.

  Wen, a longtime Taiwanese film critic and scholar devoted to Tsai, transformed what was originally his master thesis into this compelling book that provides many firsthand and exclusive stories about Tsai’s early career, including rehearsal experience during the director’s first career in experimental theater (1982–1984).

• Yeh, Emilie Yueh-Yu, and Darrell William Davis. “Camping Out with Tsai Ming-liang.” In Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island. By Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, 217–248. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

  This study of selected Taiwan film directors includes a chapter on Tsai, describing his film style as “camp,” invoking Susan Sontag’s definition: a sensibility that reveals in artifice, stylization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration.