At the new edition of Film Fest Gent (09.Oct - 20.Oct.2024), S.M.A.K. and the film festival together turn their attention to the work of celebrated Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang with the screening of the Walker series, a series of ten films the director made between 2012 and 2023.
The Walker series starts from Tsai Ming-liang's fascination with Xuanzang, the great Tang dynasty monk who inspired the 16th-century Chinese literary classic Journey to the West. Each of the films shows a monk in an impressive pose with bare feet, shaved head and dressed in a red robe. Extremely slowly, he wanders through metropolises or specific locations such as the director's birthplace.
With this poetic and minimalist response to the feverish contemporary world, the filmmaker also depicts his constant search for truth. He himself claims to have experienced the highest degree of artistic freedom when he made the Walker series, because the films are neither about narrative nor directly about meanings. ‘It's painting’.
Abiding Nowhere (2023), Tsai Ming-liang's latest Walker film, will premiere at the film festival for Belgium. Spread over the duration of the exhibition, S.M.A.K. will screen the complete series : No Form (2012), Walker (2012), Diamond Sutra (2012), Sleepwalk (2012), Walking on Water (2013), Journey to the West (2013), Journey to the West (2014), No No Sleep (2015), Sand (2018), Where (2022) en Abiding Nowhere (2023).
Tsai Ming-liang (born 1957, Malaysia) was trained as a theatre and film maker in Taiwan. He is one of the most talked-about directors of the ‘Second New Wave’ in Taiwanese cinema. He won the Golden Lion in Venice with Vive l'amour (1994) and the Silver Bear at the Berlinale with The Wayward Cloud (2005). In 2009, the Louvre acquired Face as the first film for its collection : Le Louvre s'offre aux cineastes.
Tsai Ming-liang is consciously active in the wider art world. He creates exhibitions and performance projects, holds lectures but also developed some idiosyncratic aesthetic ideas such as ‘hand-sculpted cinema’, ‘removing industrial processes from artistic creation’ or ‘the museum as cinema’. He introduces these ideas and other new ways of watching films as a means of balancing the over-commercialised film market.
Tsai Ming-liang is one of the most sensual, sensitive and sombre filmmakers of this generation. His films, which often have no storyline or dialogue, consist of slow, long takes and show life in its purest form. They show us people's helplessness, their longing, emptiness and loneliness. Through the lens, which he keeps focused on the actor Lee Kang-Sheng in almost all his films, he explores the entire condition humaine.
