Temporal Landscape Scene 2: Tsai Ming-liang Short Films

Temporal Landscape pays tribute to the award-winning director Tsai Ming-liang, focusing on his short films that capture the unhomeliness of Asia and articulate his diasporic gaze and Sinophone identity. Marked by long takes that seem to sculpt time, these films convey a trans-Asian geopolitical experience. They chart a journey from his early days in Taipei as a Malaysian Chinese, a stranger both to himself and to the plight of the city’s modernity, to later works that explore displacement and the politics of memory. In the Walker series, Tsai reenacts the pilgrimage of Xuanzang, the seventh-century Buddhist monk who traversed to India to collect and translate sutras, reimagining the travel in contemporary Taipei, his hometown Kuching in Malaysia, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Films being screened: The Skywalk is Gone, Moonlight on the River, Xining Public Housing

The Skywalk is Gone (22 minutes; 2002)

Shiang-Chyi wanders aimlessly through the Taipei Main Train Station when she notices a woman with a large suitcase crossing the street recklessly. Curious, she follows her, and both are stopped by a policeman demanding to see their IDs. The woman refuses, insisting she used to cross the street via a skywalk—now inexplicably gone—as she searches for a watch seller. The vanished skywalk unsettles Shiang-Chyi, reminding her of the rapid changes in the city and making her think of the watch seller Hsiao Kang whom she had once met. These moments feel as if they had never truly existed, or as if the scorching sun had erased her memory. Obsessed with finding the watch seller, she scans the crowds, unaware that he is already near, passing her on his way to his first casting in an unknown adult film.

Moonlight on the River (9 minutes; 2003)

Set against the backdrop of the Tamsui River at low tide and filmed near Wanhua, the short recalls the river’s layered history as a passage for Taiwanese colonization and the Franco-Sino War. Tsai Ming-liang provides an emotional narration, reflecting on the river’s present state while his gaze lingers on a stray dog wandering alone along its banks. The film was created as a retirement gift for Simon Field, former chairman of the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Xining Public Housing (62 minutes; 2024)

Xining Public Housing was one of Taiwan’s early social housing projects, consisting of two sixteen-story towers with mixed functions: a basement used as a parking lot and market, commercial floors, and housing nearly 500 households. Once home to a bustling electronics market, the building gradually decayed and have become a refuge for low-income residents and a site of urban legends about ghosts and suicides. Now facing demolition, its residents are being forced to leave. For Tsai Ming-liang, the site carries a deep personal connection. He first filmed there for the television series All the Corners of the World, about an underprivileged family in Ximending. Later, Tsai returned to the estate for his fourth feature The Hole, an allegory of the end of the millennium set in a ruined building under ceaseless rain during a spreading plague. Combining music and dance, the film was shot entirely inside Xining Public Housing. With the estate now in derelict, Tsai’s work stands as a final, intimate record of a place that shaped both his cinema and Taipei’s collective memory.

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