Film Fest Gent & S.M.A.K. put time on hold with Tsai Ming-liang's Walker series

The Walker series starts from Tsai Ming-liang's fascination with Xuanzang, the great Tang dynasty monk who inspired the 16th-century Chinese literary classic Journey to the West. Each of the films shows a monk in an impressive pose with bare feet, shaved head and dressed in a red robe. Extremely slowly, he wanders through metropolitan cites like Tokyo, Paris and Washington, D.C. or specific locations such as the director's birthplace.

The films are a poetic and minimalist response to our feverish contemporary world. Do we live too fast? It's a question Tsai must have asked when in 2011 he saw actor Lee Kang-sheng rehearsing a 17-minute slow-walking scene for a play. One year later, the duo started making the unique film series Walker, in which Lee stars as a buddhist monk. With the series, Tsai also depicts his constant search for truth. He himself claims to have experienced the highest degree of artistic freedom when he made the Walker series, because the films are neither about narrative nor directly about meanings. "It's painting."

Abiding Nowhere

Abiding Nowhere, the tenth and perhaps final film from the Walker series, will celebrate its Belgian premiere at Film Fest Gent. Tsai Ming-ling and actor Lee Kang-shen again pause time. This time around, Lee wanders through the streets of Washington, D.C. His excursions are intercut with the activities of a young man.

Exhibition at S.M.A.K.

From 10 October 2024 until 9 March 2025, all ten films will be screened at S.M.A.K., spread out over the duration of the exhibition. The complete series includes No Form (2012), Walker (2012), Diamond Sutra (2012), Sleepwalk (2012), Walking on Water (2013), Journey to the West (2014), No No Sleep (2015), Sand (2018), Where (2022) and Abiding Nowhere (2024).

With your FFG film ticket, you will have access to S.M.A.K. at a reduced rate (available at the ticket desk only) as long as the exhibition of Tsai's Walker series is running. Friends of S.M.A.K. can purchase film tickets for FFG at a reduced rate.

Tsai Ming-liang

Tsai Ming-liang (born 1957, Malaysia) was trained as a theatre and film maker in Taiwan. He is one of the most talked-about directors of the ‘Second New Wave’ in Taiwanese cinema. He won the Golden Lion in Venice with Vive l'amour (1994) and the Silver Bear at the Berlinale with The Wayward Cloud (2005). In 2009, the Louvre acquired Face as the first film for its collection "Le Louvre s'offre aux cineastes".

Tsai Ming-liang is consciously active in the wider art world. He creates exhibitions and performance projects, holds lectures but also developed some idiosyncratic aesthetic ideas such as ‘hand-sculpted cinema’, ‘removing industrial processes from artistic creation’ or ‘the museum as cinema’. He introduces these ideas and other new ways of watching films as a means of balancing the over-commercialised film market.

Tsai Ming-liang is one of the most sensual, sensitive and sombre filmmakers of this generation. His films, which often have no storyline or dialogue, consist of slow, long takes and show life in its purest form. They show us people's helplessness, their longing, emptiness and loneliness. Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) is considered one of the greatest films of all time (#108 in Sight and Sound poll in 2022). Through the lens, which he keeps focused on the actor Lee Kang-Sheng in almost all his films, he explores the entire condition humaine.