Where

Tsai Ming-liang / France, Taiwan / 2022 / Czech Premiere / 91 min.

synopsis

The slow-walking monk, played by Tsai's life partner and muse Lee Kang-sheng, who stars in all of his films, is part of the director's series of gallery “walker” films, which also include Journey to the West (2014) and Abiding Nowhere (2024). The Buddhist meditation, filmed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of Tsai's retrospective, places a man in monk's robes in an art gallery or on a busy street. The spiritual is transformed into the performative, imposing new roles and meanings on the meditating figure. It transforms the monk into a living image, an exhibit, an attraction and an object of cultural encounter and passing.

“The body is the most beautiful thing we have, or you could say it’s the ugliest thing we have. We can sell bodies, we can adore or worship bodies.”

Source: Mubi

biography

Tsai Ming-liang (1957) is a Malaysian native who lives and works in Taiwan. Together with Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-hsien, he is a leading representative of the Taiwanese New Wave. His work has features of slow cinema, conceptual art and performance art and deals with themes of loneliness, time and memory. His second feature, Vive L'Amour (1994), won the Golden Lion at Venice, The River (1997) won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and The Wayward Cloud (2005) competed there.