Temporal Landscape Scene 1: Tsai Ming-liang Short Films

Temporal Landscape pays tribute to the award-winning director Tsai Ming-liang, focusing on his short films that capture the unhomeliness of Asia and articulate his diasporic gaze and Sinophone identity. Marked by long takes that seem to sculpt time, these films convey a trans-Asian geopolitical experience. They chart a journey from his early days in Taipei as a Malaysian Chinese, a stranger both to himself and to the plight of the city’s modernity, to later works that explore displacement and the politics of memory. In the Walker series, Tsai reenacts the pilgrimage of Xuanzang, the seventh-century Buddhist monk who traversed to India to collect and translate sutras, reimagining the travel in contemporary Taipei, his hometown Kuching in Malaysia, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

This screening will be followed by an in-conversation with Tsai Ming-liang Professor Andy Willis, offering insights into Tsai’s artistic practice and legacy, with interpretation by Clare Liu.

Films to be screened: It’s a Dream, Madame Butterfly, No Form, The Night

It’s a Dream (22 mins; 2007)
Shot in an abandoned cinema in Malaysia, the artist’s home country, the film evokes his earliest encounters with cinema and recalls the golden age of Asian film culture. Within this dreamlike reconstruction, members of the director’s family reappear, with the singular exception of the artist’s mother, who plays herself. Here, the act of watching cinema becomes intertwined with the obscenity of eroticism, drawing out the intimate, almost forbidden proximity between image and desire. This gesture underscores the layered feelings of displacement and memory, shaped by the artist’s absence from his hometown for more than thirty-five years.

Madame Butterfly (35 minutes; 2008)
Baozhu, a middle-aged but beautiful woman from a small town, travels to Kuala Lumpur for a secret date with a man. The next morning, he disappears, leaving her with a large unpaid hotel bill. After settling it, Baozhu has no money left to return home and waits at the crowded Pudu Bus Station, trying to reach him on her cellphone. When he finally answers, their conversation erupts into a heated argument. People around her notice her distress, including a blind couple sharing her table while eating noodles. Street singers in the station also sense her pain. Though none of them can help, they sing to comfort the disappointed and lost woman, who no longer knows where to go.

No Form (20 minutes; 2012)
Set in Taipei, the film follows Hsiao Kang playing the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang, as he slowly moves past the Ay-Chung Rice-Flour Noodle shop through the crowds of Shilin Night Market and into a stark white space. His origins and destination remain uncertain, his journey suspended in ambiguity. Originally a mobile phone advertisement, this short offers a curious cinematic trace of commodity, filmmaking and a contemporary pilgrimage of Xuanzang.

The Night (20 minutes; 2021)
In 2019, on a night after the Umbrella Movement, the landscape of everyday life in Hong Kong was no longer the same. Wandering through the streets of Causeway Bay, Tsai Ming-Liang captured the city’s rhythms and ambience, along with the quiet presence of an overpass. All the while, an old song echoed in his mind: “The beautiful night is slipping away. I hate to see you go. Why must our bliss end so soon? Why must we part when we’ve only just begun?”

Part of the Tsai Ming-Liang film festival. Read more here.