Tsai Ming Liang is a renowned Taiwanese director whose success alongside contemporaries such as Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang has brought Taiwanese cinema to the forefront of international attention. Tsai's films are often endearingly described as films where nothing seems to happen, yet each film magically conveys a deep, heartfelt and humane emotion. Ultimately though, Tsai is best known for his unique film style which skillfully blends extreme long takes with a keen eye for staging and frame dimension, allowing the viewer to unobtrusively witness the complex behaviour of his lovably obscure characters.


Tsai Ming Liang was born in Kuching, Malaysia in 1957. His love for the cinema began at an early age with his grandparents regularly taking him to watch films from Hong Kong, China, and India. After completing high school, Tsai relocated to Taiwan where he attended Taipei's Chinese Culture University studying film and drama. Following his graduation in 1982, he quickly found work directing and writing for theatre and television. This period in Tsai's career developed his outlook on filmmaking, most notably his embrace of a documentary style and his fondness for using non-actors. While working in television, Tsai teamed up with Lee Kang-Sheng, an actor who has since 1991 appeared in every one of Tsai's feature films, and recently directed his own film, entitled The Missing. Originally meeting at the entrance of a game arcade, Tsai soon discovered Lee's obscure yet natural talent for acting in their first collaboration Boys.


This collaboration continued in 1992 with Tsai's first feature, Rebels of the Neon God, where Lee initially established the lovably introverted character known as Hsiao-Kang (Lee's real life nickname), who would then reappear in Vive L'Amour, The River, What Time is it There?, and The Wayward Cloud. Rebels of the Neon God tells the story of Hsiao-Kang, a disenchanted youth who, much to the anger of his family, quits school to follow a group of delinquents roaming the streets of Taipei, committing petty crimes. The film is surprisingly well crafted for a first feature, working as a complex portrait of youth displacement in busy Taipei. Though narratively more linear and tame than Tsai's later films, Rebels of the Neon God includes many traits that would resurface in his later films, including Buddhist ritual, the symbolic importance of water, the aimlessness the youth, erotically charged characters and the voyeuristic observation of human behaviour.


1994 ushered in Tsai's striking, remarkable, and erotically-charged film Vive L'Amour. Once again, we return to the disenchanted Hsiao-Kang, this time playing an unsuccessful salesman who is intertwined with other lonely individuals searching for companionship in busy Taipei. The films narrative is anchored around a vacant apartment where the films three main characters, Hsiao-Kang, Ah-Jung and May-Lin engage in compulsive sexual liaisons, bizarre cat-and-mouse games, and other eccentric behavioural habits, all incited by a desperate sense of loneliness. What is particularly striking about Vive L'Amour is its penchant for minimal dialogue and soundtrack that prove to be powerfully alienating, viciously compressing the characters' emotions till the closing minutes of the film. Furthermore, Tsai skillfully uses his location to elicit, at times, extremely humorous or touching moments of character interaction. Vive L'Amour was awarded the Golden Lion and the FIPRESCI Award at the 1994 Venice Film Festival.


Tsai's next feature The River (1997), is one of his more sombre films, dealing with loneliness, alienation, and the troubles of a dysfunctional family. Despite it being centred on such disheartening subjects, it's still one of Tsai's most humorous films. The River returns to Hsiao-Kang and his family, this time at their most dynamic. Hsiao-Kang drifts through life jobless, his mother is having an affair with a man who pirates pornography, and his father regularly seeks out intimacy in a gay bathhouse. The dynamics of the family become even more explicit when they are forced to band together after Hsiao-Kang contracts a mysteriously bizarre and incapacitating neck pain. The River invests a lot in the symbolic (as with every other of Tsai's films); Hsiao-Kang's mysterious neck pain acts as a manifestation as the problems plaguing his family, and the presence of water (via a leaky ceiling) acts as a manifestation of the sexual frustration experienced by Hsiao-Kang's parents. The River is one of Tsai's most highly awarded films; in 1997 it won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and received a Special Mention at Edinburgh.


Tsai's next film, entitled The Hole (1998), pays homage to the legacy of Hong Kong cinema legend Grace Chan in fine form. The film delves more into artifice than his other films; slapstick comedy, dance, and fantasy come across fresh and enjoyable. The film is set seven days from the turn of the millennium where large parts of Taipei have been evacuated due to the outbreak of the "Taiwan Fever Epidemic" which makes people act like cockroaches. Worse yet, Taipei seems to be drowning from relentless rain, producing a sense of foreboding doom. Nonetheless, a strange young man (Lee) and woman (Yang Kuei-Mei), refuse to evacuate their waterlogged apartment building, opting instead to continue living amongst the chaos. Due to the torrential water damage, a plumber digs a hole between Lee's and Yang's apartment, thus providing context for the two somewhat reclusive characters to interact. Like the apartment in Vive L'Amour, the hole is there to provide an interesting space that elicits interaction between Tsai's socially handicapped characters. Furthermore, the hole skillfully stages Tsai's proficiency for creating good slapstick comedy; Lee continually probes the cavity while Yang persistently patches it up. The Hole was commissioned by French television La Sept Arte, as part of a film series dealing with the new millennium under the title "As seen by 2000." The Hole was awarded the FIPRESCI Award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for its original use of realism and fantasy.


Made in 2001, What Time is it There?, is possibly Tsai's most well known film, and deservedly so, as it successfully blends comic humour with a deep sense of pathos. The film returns again to Hsiao-Kang, who now earns a living selling watches on a busy Taipei boardwalk. Soon after the loss of his father, Hsiao-Kang meets a young woman named Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi), who will soon depart for Paris. After several attempts to buy a suitable watch, Shiang-chyi convinces Hsiao-Kang to sell his own watch to her. Still in mourning and annoyed by his mothers constant religious rituals, Hsiao-Kang finds comfort in the memory of his encounter with Shiang-chyi, and it inspires him to watch Truffaut's The 400 Blows and to set all the clocks he comes across in Taipei to Paris time (Jean-Pierre Leaud has a brief cameo in the film). What Time is it There? is the film which most successfully displays Tsai's cinematic devices, in particular, the use of an observational style. Tsai shows how people act when they are alone, and it's when they are alone that his characters fully reveal their complex idiosyncrasies, making them lovable and unique. What Time is it There? was awarded the Special Jury Award at the 2001 Golden Horse Film Festival and was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes in the same year.


Made in 2003, Goodbye Dragon Inn is Tsai's most formally rigid film to date, paying homage to King Hu's masterpiece Dragon Gate Inn, and making protest to the death of cinema-going. The film is set entirely within an old cinema on its closing night, where the last film showing is Hu's Dragon Gate Inn. The film observes a few patrons who are not there to watch the film, but rather to seek out some bizarre interaction with each other. The characters are charged with a creepy and comical sexual tension that at one point strangely attempts to unfold in the men's toilets. Goodbye Dragon Inn has virtually no dialogue and Tsai's shot length has become progressively longer with even less camera movement than his previous works, successfully emphasising the film's observational humour. At times the utter lack of dialogue is graciously replaced by the aurally pleasing sounds of Hu's Dragon Gate Inn, as it's projected on the cinema screen. Goodbye Dragon Inn won the FIPRESCI Award at the 2004 Venice Film Festival for its ode to the death of cinema-going.


2005 brings with it Tsai's latest feature, The Wayward Cloud, which picks up where What Time is it There? left off, returning again to the bizarre misadventures of Hsiao-Kang. Since What Time is it There?, Hsiao-Kang has retired from his watch sales position to pursue a part-time career in the pornography industry as an actor. Unlike all of Tsai's previous films, The Wayward Cloud is set in the midst of a drought where strangely, the government is enforcing watermelon juice as a substitute to water. Here Tsai's previous preoccupations with water as a symbolic reference to sexual activity becomes more impassioned when substituted with watermelon juice. The film builds upon Tsai's usual preoccupations using interaction, eroticism, alienation, minimal dialogue, voyeurism and musical vignettes (much like in The Hole) to create the film. The Wayward Cloud was recently awarded the Silver Bear, the FIPRESCI Award, and the Alfred Bauer Award at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival.






Published June 24, 2005