Ts’ai Ming-liang

(Cai Mingliang)

b. 1958, Kuching, Malaysia

Film director

Ts’ai Ming-liang graduated in 1982 in drama and cinema from the Chinese Culture University of Taiwan, and is regarded as the foremost second-generation filmmaker of Taiwan’s ‘New Cinema movement’ (see cinema in Taiwan). A series of five films have all featured a single three-member (highly dysfunctional) family and set of performers: Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive l’Amour (1994, winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion award), The River (1997), The Hole (1998), What Time Is It There? (2001). Profound alienation matched with a dry, black humour is the watch-word of these films. Obsession and repression, physical pollution, lengthy silences and endless repetition, claustrophobic apartments drenched in overflowing water, and gigantic communication gaps between husband, wife and child are all combined with a monumentally slow pace to define a distinctive cinematic style that comments with exaggerated understatement on modern urban alienation in Taipei. Action, when it comes, is sudden and vengeful. Sexuality, including masturbation and incestuous homosexuality, is neurotic but also embraces Taiwan’s recent championing of gay rights. With the son, Hsiao-kang, performed by Lee Kang-sheng, Ts’ai has created a comic character as ironic as Jacques Tati’s Mr Hulot and as identifiable to a committed Taiwan audience as Charlie Chaplin.

Ts’ai’s most recent film is Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), about the few people who drifted in one evening to see the King Hu film, Dragon Inn.

Further reading

Berry, Chris (1999). ‘Where is Love? The Paradox of Performing Loneliness in Ts’ai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour’. In Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (eds), Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Sydney: Power Publications.

Martin, Fran (2003). ‘Vive l’Amour. Eloquent Emptiness’. In Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus, 25 New Takes. London: BFI, 175–82.

Rehm, Jean-Pierre, Joyard, Olivier and Rivière, Danièle (1999). Tsai Ming-liang. Paris: Dis voir.

Rojas, Carlos (2003). “‘Nezha Was Here”: Structures of Dis/placement in Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of a Neon God’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15.1 (Spring): 63–89.

Wang, Ban (2003). ‘Black Holes of Globalization: Critique of the New Millennium in Taiwan Cinema’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15.1 (Spring): 90–119.

JEROME SILBERGELD