A State of Uncertainty

There’s no exact precedent for the long creative collaboration between Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng. In 1991, as the story goes, Tsai stepped out of a screening of a David Lynch movie and spotted Lee sitting on a motorbike outside of an arcade. The director was struggling to cast a television program about troubled teens, so he struck up a conversation with Lee and invited him to audition. During the shoot Tsai became frustrated and began to doubt whether Lee could perform the role, and in the process he discovered that the problem was his own expectations. “I was projecting too many of my own ideas onto Lee’s performance, rather than allowing him to draw upon his own natural way of behaving,” Tsai told Declan McGrath in 2019.

Over the course of three decades and more than 30 films, Tsai and Lee have constantly refined and simplified their methods of observation, first stripping away traditional performance styles, and then the three-act structure, and then, finally, the industrial machinery of film production. Following his last narrative feature, (2013), Tsai hinted at retirement. In fact, he moved increasingly into art spaces, taking commissions for gallery work and exploring the breakthrough he had achieved in 2012 with the first of the films, in which Lee, dressed in the red robes of a Buddhist monk, moves as slowly as possible through urban environments. Tsai has said that he now happily accepts his destiny, which is simply to film Lee