Tsai Ming-liang

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.