While Days, Tsai Ming-liang’s new feature film, presented in competition at the Berlinale 2020, is finally released in cinemas, Tsai Ming-liang is also presenting a new exhibition called « Une quête » at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Alongside the exhibition, Centre Pompidou presents a complete retrospective of his films.
Associated since the mid-1990s, with his first film Rebels of the Neon God, with the Taiwanese new wave, of which Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang are said to be the elders, Tsai Ming-liang is certainly one of the most prominent figures of his generation. In 2003, he composed a nostalgic and distraught ode to the power of cinema, the unforgettable Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Each of his thirteen feature films and more than twenty shorts, including a few films for television, combine a form of aesthetic asceticism with formal attempts that sometimes revisit the genre. The Taiwanese filmmaker depicts his island as a hallucinated territory. For almost thirty years, he has been making the most of the mute strength of his favourite actor, Lee Kang-sheng, and has been recounting - from The Hole in 1998, to Stray Dogs in 2013, via The Taste of Watermelon in 2005 - the incommunicability between men and the desire that alone allows them to escape. In 2012, he began the Walker Series, a reflexive work on the notion of slowness, with nine works to date, in which Lee Kang-Sheng moves through urban landscapes.
On 25 November, Tsai Ming-liang will be present for the inauguration of the exhibition, doing a live performance in the company of his actors, Lee Kang-sheng and Anong Houngheuangsy. The 9th work of the Walker series, titled Where, filmed at the Centre Pompidou last June, will also be presented. To close the evening, Tsai Ming-liang presents his new feature film Days, which will be released in theaters on November 30.
Front image: Walker (Tsai Ming-liang, 2012)