Tsai Ming-liang

Born to a Chinese family in Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang came to Taiwan during the flowering of the film industry’s New Wave and, standing on the shoulders of the groundbreaking directors Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, became the defining artist of the country’s Second Wave. Distinguished by deadpan humor, an intimate acquaintance with despair and isolation, and a minutely controlled mise-en-scene in which the smallest gestures give off enormous reverberations, Tsai’s films comprise one of the most distinctive and monumental bodies of work of the past 25 years.

Presented with support from Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York. Special thanks to Homegreen Films, Central Motion Picture Corp., the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, and Fortissimo Films.