To coincide with the 51st Film Fest Gent, S.M.A.K. and the film festival are currently spotlighting the work of celebrated Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang. They are coming together to present the Walker series, a set of ten films the director created between 2012 and 2023.
Image above: Tsai Ming-Liang, Walker series, Abiding Nowhere Still, photo by Claude Wang 21.
The Walker series is rooted in Tsai Ming-liang’s fascination with Xuanzang, the influential Tang Dynasty monk who inspired the 16th-century Chinese literary classic Journey to the West. Each film portrays a monk in a striking, reserved pose, barefoot, tonsured, and clad in a crimson robe. With extraordinary slowness, he navigates bustling metropolises or specific locations, such as the director’s birthplace.
The filmmaker, with this poetic and minimalist response to the frantic modern world, also expresses his personal search for truth. Tsai Ming-liang claims he experienced the highest level of artistic freedom while creating the Walker series, stating, ‘It’s painting,’ free from narrative or explicit meaning.
The Walker films serve as moving paintings, with carefully framed compositions that invite the eye to explore each detail while the Walker advances, step by step. Tsai Ming-liang wonders why a cinema cannot also be a museum. By stripping away the narrative, he challenges the expectation that the filmmaker must lead us, granting us the freedom to shape our own viewing experience
Tsai Ming-liang
Born in 1957 in Kuching, Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang trained in Taiwan as a theatre and film director, and is one of the leading figures of the ‘Second New Wave’ in Taiwanese cinema. His film Vive l’amour (1994) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and The Wayward Cloud (2005) took home the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. The Louvre acquired his film Face in 2009, as its first cinematic acquisition for the collection Le Louvre s’offre aux cineastes.
Actively engaged in the wider art world, Tsai Ming-liang not only creates exhibitions and performance projects and gives lectures, but has also developed idiosyncratic aesthetic ideas, such as ‘hand-sculpted cinema,’ ‘the removal of industrial processes from artistic creation,’ and ‘the museum as cinema.’ He presents these concepts, along with other innovative ways of experiencing film, as a counterbalance to the highly commercialised film industry.
Tsai Ming-liang is an intensely sensual, sensitive, and melancholic filmmaker. His films, which frequently forgo plot and dialogue, consist of slow, extended shots that reveal life in its rawest state. They portray human helplessness, desire, emptiness, and solitude. Through a lens almost always focused on actor Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai explores the depth of the human condition
Screening schedule:
Throughout Film Fest (8 to 20 October 2024), S.M.A.K. will be screening one film from the Walker series on a continuous loop each day. The films will be presented in chronological order, with the exception of Abiding Nowhere, which will have its Belgian premiere during Film Fest Ghent 2024.
S.M.A.K. will screen one film from the Walker series on a continuous loop every two weeks between 21 October 2024 and 9 March 2025. The series will be shown in chronological order, concluding with the screening of Abiding Nowhere during the final two weeks of the exhibition
WHEN?
Exhibition period: Thursday, 10. October 2024 until Sunday, 9. March 2025
Opening hours: Tuesday until Friday, 9:30 am until 5:30 pm
school holidays – weekends – public holidays: 10 am until 6 pm – Closed on Mondays
WHERE?
S.M.A.K.
Jan Hoetplein 1
9000 Gent, Belgium
COSTS?
Regular: 13 EUR
