Temporal Landscape Scene 4: 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.

Films to be screened: Erotic Space

Erotic Space (98 minutes; 2007)
Tsai Ming-Liang and his longtime collaborator Lee Kang-Sheng (Xiao Kang) travel across Europe and Asia often for film festivals yet always in search of something beyond the cinematic stage. With a DV camera in hand, Tsai records their journey—not as a conventional documentary, but as a series of observational sketches in reflexive moving images. Through this quiet, persistent gaze, the film reveals the dual nature of being on the road: the encounter with unfamiliar cultures, the deep intimacy shared between filmmaker and actor, as well as memory and cinema blending like a dreamscape.

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