Temporal Landscape Scene 3: 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: A Conversation with God, Time, Walker

A Conversation with God (32 minutes; 2001)
The project began with the idea of filming a psychic medium, under the title A Conversation with God. But the medium refused, saying her deity did not wish to be filmed. One night, upon hearing that the medium had entered a trance and the god had awakened, Tsai Ming-Liang rushed out on his 50cc motorbike with a DV camera and was determined to ask for permission to film the scene. On the way, however, he was caught in a traffic jam. A nearby temple was holding a ritual for the goddess Mazu’s birthday, with banquet tables spilling into the road. As the camera shifted toward the ecological surroundings of the temple, a spiritual dimension revealed itself where ritual, faith, and modernity converge in the transformation of social space.

Time (38 minutes; 2010)
In a rundown Han-style house on the Pescadores Islands, a lone mattress stands as a silent witness to the layered histories of Chinese migration and the echoes of the Sino-French War. The archipelago, once a site of conflicts, was captured by the French in March 1885 during the Pescadores Campaign, marking the final chapter of Admiral Amédée Courbet, who was buried there. Through a meditative lens, the film reflects on the weight of time embedded in the landscape, where past and present converge. The stillness of the mattress, weathered by the elements, becomes a metaphor for displacement, memory and the lingering traces of those who once crossed these waters.

Walker (26 minutes; 2012)
The second piece in the Walker series was commissioned by the Hong Kong International Film Festival. The series takes its name from Xiao Kang’s striking performance that first developed in Tsai Ming-Liang’s theatre work: dressed in a red monk’s robe, he walks with extreme slowness through urban space. He passes through Hong Kong landmarks such as Admiralty, Goose Neck Bridge, and the Star Ferry Pier. Surrounded by dense shopping crowds or moving through empty streets, the radical juxtaposition of Xiao Kang’s slow, deliberate steps against the city’s frenetic pace transforms familiar sites into estranged spaces. Through Tsai’s gaze, the rapid transformations of Hong Kong are revealed with both tenderness and quiet intensity.

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