Tsai Ming-liang is something of a curiosity to Western audiences. Born in Malaysia, Tsai has become one of the most celebrated film directors in Taiwan and numbers among the foremost progenitors of “slow cinema”, a style of filmmaking defined by extended takes, subdued action, and minimalist storylines that unfurl over durations that can be uncomfortably long for some viewers. He’s been thrice nominated for the Cannes Palme d’Or, and taken home major awards from the Berlin International Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival. He’s also a gay man, one whose work posits a queerness rooted in Taoism and other Eastern philosophies. His is a queerness that is simultaneously aligned with and in opposition to Western conceptions — a queerness that does not exist as a separate thing adversarial to society, but that is an intrinsic part of nature and the world, something that is and always was. At first glance, it can seem difficult to know what to make of his work. The pensive rhythm of Tsai’s films and the relentlessly defiant queer perspective that resists clichés appear to clash discordantly — but in fact, they fuel each other, often in surprising and disorienting ways.

Tsai Ming-liang’s best-known films include Vive L’amour (1994), The Hole (1998), What Time is it There? (2001), and Days (2020). His stories usually entail the listless adventures of protagonists adrift in the neon wash of urban landscapes in which they struggle to discover a sense of belonging. Despite their glacial pacing, Tsai’s films are underwritten with the manic energy of pure desire. Their prolonged sequences tend to culminate and erupt in scenes of erotic release. Perhaps the most stunning example comes at the end of The River (1997) when the main character, played by Lee Kang-sheng, gets a handjob in the darkness of a gay bathhouse from an older man who turns out to be his closeted father.

Such explosive outbursts of faggotry are by no means the norm in Tsai’s films. Favoring understatement, an aesthetics of banality, and the quotidian taken to brutal extremes, the deceptively slow quality of his films can feel at times as if nothing is happening, when in fact plenty is unfolding, just at a more lifelike pace than mainstream cinema-goers are accustomed to. Tsai’s studious and empathetic approach compels his audience to find fascination in characters whose psychology and emotional lives might otherwise seem largely inaccessible.

Exhibit A would be his first feature, Rebels of the Neon God (1992). Also the feature debut of the aforementioned actor Lee Kang-sheng — who’s gone on to star or feature in every single one of Tsai’s films up to the present day. In Neon God, Lee’s character serves as a stand-in for the filmmaker himself. Living at home in Taipei with his parents, Hsiao-kang (Lee’s character name in nearly all of Tsai’s films) becomes obsessed with a couple of juvenile delinquents, whom he spots in an arcade one day. He then proceeds to stalk these youths throughout the city over the course of what seems to be several weeks. Whether this is motivated by erotic obsession, or a simple desire to be them or be like them, is all left up to the viewer to decide. Toward the end of the film, Hsiao-kang vandalizes the motor-scooter of one of the boys while he is at a love hotel having sex with a chick he picked up. He slashes the seat and writes the words “AIDS” across it in English. Through the inherent homophobia and sex-negativity of this act, one wonders whether Hsiao-kang is giving rise to a repressed longing, which so often manifests as frustrated identification with the object of desire, or else a projected identification.

Lee Kang-sheng in *Vive* *L’amour* (1994)

It’s worth pausing for a moment to discuss Lee Kang-sheng’s face, which adds an entire level of abjection both to Neon God and every other Tsai film that they’d otherwise lack. Besides Lee’s obvious beauty — always subjective, sure, but with his soulful eyes and voluptuous ruby lips, this is rather hard to argue against — his distinguishing feature here is an utterly affectless void of emotion. No matter what happens to his characters throughout their journeys, Lee’s silence, the mystery of his expressionlessness, and the beauty that shines through despite these obstacles play a prominent role in the tapestry of contradictions woven through Tsai’s filmic oeuvre. In a 2022 interview, Tsai said that had he not met Lee, he would never have developed the distinctive style for which his films have become known; rather, his films would have featured more dialogue and been more conventional in pacing and other respects. This is a case in which the muse has very much dictated the outcome of the artist’s work.

Tsai’s decades-long fixation with Lee as a subject has led many to speculate about the nature of the two men’s relationship. Certainly, there is something erotic about Tsai’s many close-ups of Lee’s face and often scantily clad or nude body. But if there is something romantic or sexual about their relationship, it is purely in the realm of the cinematic. While the two men even live together — such is the intensity of their collaboration over the years — their relationship has been steadfastly platonic: Tsai is openly gay, while Lee is straight.

Still, the enduring cruisiness of Tsai’s gaze readily transfers to the viewer, particularly in a film like Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). First and foremost a film about the love of cinema, it embraces its erotic cinematic visuals to a degree that almost invites the audience to cruise the shots with their eyes. Lee plays a theater projectionist running the last 90 minutes of Chinese director King Hu’s classic martial arts flick Dragon Inn (1967) (a huge influence on Tsai) in a Taipei movie theater about to shut its doors for good. The star of Goodbye, Dragon Inn is the cinema itself. Here, the cinema becomes a cruising ground, as a Japanese tourist (played by Kiyonobu Mitamura) approaches and attempts to have sex with multiple lone male audience members — many of whom are the aged stars of the original Dragon Inn — only to have his frustrated advances rebuffed. The silence, stillness, warm glow, and projection sounds are all that is left in this space charged with erotic potential left unfulfilled.

And yet there is no frustration from this lack of fulfillment — these silent, wordless spaces are what form the crux of Tsai’s work. There is a contentment in being in the moment, resting in the inseparable interconnection of all things, and a letting go of the very desire these films cultivate that is drawn directly from Eastern thought.

In recent years — since 2013’s Stray Dogs, which found Lee playing a homeless father to two young children adrift on the streets of Taipei — Tsai opted to go even further into silence and wordlessness by ceasing to write screenplays altogether. While he has made eight films in the interim, they are all unscripted. The majority of them belong to the “Walker” series, loosely inspired by the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West (c. 1592), which features a visibly aging Lee, adorned in a red Taoist monk’s robe, walking in extremely slow-motion in various locales around the globe. Paradoxically, one might view these films as an acceleration of a process that began with Rebels of the Neon God — allowing slowness, as a wandering force, to gradually take control of everything — not merely the pace of the film, but the frame as well. Tsai has come to accentuate a spiritual dimension that has always been there, hovering in the background.

For Taoism and other East Asian faiths, homosexuality and bisexuality have never been burdened with the condemnation they receive from Abrahamic religions. In this part of the world, nature, rather than God, is the mysterious divinity par excellence that can never be wholly understood, a divinity that encompasses everything, including all instincts, orientations, and identities. We may therefore attempt to replicate or become one with its processes, but we can never fully comprehend its inherent flux and ambiguities. Put another way, fucking — whether “straight” or “gay” — is merely a part of nature and has nothing to do with morality. This gets to the heart of Eastern versus Western queerness. What is it to be queer — to be different, or deviant — in a culture where being “queer” is seen as an inherent part of nature, and by extension, the divine?

What we are left with is a space — one demarcated by desire, surely — but also one in which ambiguity is deliberately allowed. A space where the thinking isn’t done for us and where we have the freedom to cast our roving gaze and thoughts to determine for ourselves what story is actually being told. Tsai Ming-liang and his slow, often queer cinema is a celebration of the world that lies beneath every surface. And those surfaces alone — in their meanderings and interactions with other surfaces — contain multitudes, if only we are willing to open ourselves to their silent rumblings.

Published July 1, 2024