A leading filmmaker of contemporary Chinese-language cinema, Tsai Ming-Liang has produced one of the most striking cinematic oeuvres of the past quarter-century. Malaysian by birth, Taiwanese by residence, internationally funded but belonging to nowhere in particular, Tsai’s moody, pensive, deadpan films are haunted by loss, failure, and broken attachments. But these films are not mere exercises in nostalgia: collaging the fragments of contemporary life into a cinema of alienation, precarity, and queerness, Tsai’s slow style and serial characters iterate and interrogate all the ways attachment falls short amid the austerity, inequality, and increasing uncertainty rapidly proliferating in the margins of modernity. Tsai’s muse, Lee Kang-Sheng, stars in every film as Tsai’s alter ego, Hsiao-Kang (“Little Wealth”), a transient protagonist working job after unstable job on the abject underside of the fast and flashy global economy. Wayward encounters, unorthodox intimacies, and inarticulate desires give way to austere, surreal tableaus: shots and scenes extend for many minutes, producing a cinema as intense and precise as it is diffuse and disorganized. Individually, the films flirt with formlessness, but are threaded together by recurrent motifs—phone booths, flooded apartments, mysterious ailments, glowing screens, cockroaches, mumbled meals, lost keys, spiritual possession, and watermelons. Tsai Ming-Liang’s films amplify, reinforce, and refract one another—exploring the incoherence structuring our attachments to objects and others. From September 30, 2022 through October 25, 2022, Tsai Ming-Liang (director), Lee Kang-Sheng (actor), Anong Houngheuangsy (actor), and Claude Wang (producer) will be joining the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Doc Films, and the Block Museum in Chicago; the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in DC; the Harvard Film Archive in Boston; and the MoMA in New York City—Tsai
