SEC 10 (2+3) pp.

179–194 Intellect Limited 2013

Studies in European Cinema

Volume 10 Numbers 2 & 3
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/seci.10.2-3.179_1

Erik Bordeleau
Université libre de Bruxelles

Soulful sedentarity:
Tsai Ming-Liang at home
at the museum

Abstract Keywords
Tsai Ming-Liang’s most recent cinema has developed in close relationship with Tsai Ming-Liang
museal spaces. His last film, Face (2009), was commissioned and co-produced by Isabelle Stengers
the Louvre Museum, which invited Tsai to create the first opus of the ‘The Louvre slow cinema
Invites Filmmakers’ collection, a series of works that are intended to renew our under- existential territory
standing of one of the world’s greatest art collections. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum cosmopolitics
has also recently added Tsai Ming-Liang’s ‘It’s a Dream’ (2007), a nostalgic and transductive experience
autobiographical video installation first presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale, to its
permanent collection. Finally, his short feature Moonlight on the River (2004) as
well as Lee Kang-Sheng’s Remembrance (2009) are part of an unorthodox video
installation located at the Xue Xue Institute in Taipei, which includes a branch of
the Tsaileelu coffee shop he owns with two of his beloved actors, and a series of
49 chairs gathered from all corners of Taiwan. As Tsai Ming-Liang puts it, ‘gradu-
ally my movies find a home, and that is the museum’. In this article, I would like
to show just how Tsai’s latest works and their domestic or oikological dimension
can be best understood as soulful propositions for transductive experiences through
Isabelle Stengers’ concept of sedentary component of practices.

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Erik Bordeleau

Imagine yourself as transparent as glass, and everything that is inside you

can be seen by the environment that you are in. You do not need to offer
words or thoughts or change anything, just imagine that everything that is
inside you can be seen by whatever is outside of you. This is an offering, and
what is being offered is your soul.
Cooley Windsor

Prologue: Tsai Ming-Liang, a European film-maker?

Tsai is a quintessentially transnational director whose admiration for the
French New Wave in general and the work of François Truffaut and Jean-
Pierre Léaud in particular is well known and has been widely discussed. He
has been rightly heralded as someone who could renew and develop the
French New Wave tradition, and, in that sense, it didn’t come so much as
a surprise to see Henri Loyrette, director of the Louvre Museum, requiring
his service to establish stronger bonds between modern art and the Louvre’s
collection. As Tsai Ming-Liang explains,

What was really great about the Louvre’s invitation was that it coincided
with a Truffaut retrospective somewhere in France. And I was invited
there as well because my film What Time Is It There? featured a short
homage to Truffaut, so I ended up seeing that film with all of Truffaut’s
regularly used actors right there in the venue. That in itself was a very
touching moment for me, and the next day the invitation by the Louvre
Museum arrived. So now that invitation was for me inexorably linked
with Truffaut’s films.
(Vijn 2010)

I have described elsewhere the ethical and cinematographic importance of the

Truffaut-Léaud privileged relationship for Tsai and how it has deeply influ-
enced the way he envisages his long-lasting commitment with his fetish actor,
Lee Kang-Sheng (Bordeleau 2011). Prolonging an ongoing meditation on art
practices as power of exposure and concealment, vital play and artistic dis-
play, this article focuses on a lesser-known side of Tsai’s work through an
analysis of his video installation at the Xue Xue Institute in Taipei. This will be
the occasion of questioning Tsai’s complex and vital connexion to the museal
exhibition spaces in an age where the importance of movie theatres and its
primacy as a site for collective transformation is in steady decline.

Standing alone like a temple

But the soul is also nostalgia, and the eternal nostalgia of the soul always goes
to space.
Max Bense

Tsai Ming-Liang’s love for movie theatres is well known. Just think of Goodbye,
Dragon Inn (2003), a work entirely dedicated to preserving the memory of the
now-destroyed Fu-Ho Theatre in Taipei, in which he shoots the empty cinema
for nearly five (endless) minutes. The utter absence of any action in this
famous sequence, apart from a caretaker bustling about for a few moments
in the room, gradually makes the cinema appear as the main protagonist of
the movie. Absolutely nothing happens but the slow emergence of the place

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itself – and, negatively, its oncoming disappearance. The extreme flatness of 1. For a recent and
multifaceted
the sequence is the condition by which we are introduced to the time specific exploration of the
to the disappearing cinema – or so is Tsai’s cinematic bet. experience of movie-
One might also think of ‘It’s a Dream’ (2007), a short film part of the going around the
world, see Knight et al.
To Each His Own Cinema project (Chacun son cinéma), a 2007 anthology film (2011).
commissioned for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes film festival. The film is
a collection of 34 short films, each 3 minutes in length, made by 36 acclaimed
directors invited to express ‘their state of mind of the moment as inspired by
the motion picture theatre’ (Jacob 2007). Tsai later edited a 23-minute film
installation version of the film that was presented at the 2007 Venice Biennial,
as part of the Taiwanese pavilion called ‘Atopia’, which was recently added to
the Taipei Fine Arts Museum permanent collection. In Venice, a small-scale
cinema was recreated there for the occasion, with red worn seats taken from
an old cinema in a small declining country town of Malaysia, where the film
was shot. In Taipei, rows of the same seats were arranged partially to face
each other so that the spectators cannot but see each other as they are watch-
ing the film. This emphasis on the movie theatre as a propitious site for social
interaction and encounter is further enhanced by a sequence in the film in
which a woman, sitting by herself eating a fruit kebab, surreptitiously tends
it towards a man sitting on the row behind her, without ever looking at him.
This mute gesture of food sharing is both touching and hilarious, as it soberly
discloses an unexpected way of relating to others in the dark enchanted space
of the movie theatre.
In a recent interview following the exhibition of It’s a Dream in Taipei,
Tsai insists on the importance of movie theatres as a public space in his child-
hood and the collective dimension of the movie-going experience:

I went back to a cinema in Malaysia that I was very familiar with … This
type of cinema was built in the 1950s, 1960s or even 1970s. Usually one
cinema could accommodate 800 or even 1,000 people. That is what I call
the golden age of cinema and I wanted to present the collective memory of
the golden age of cinema in this work.

Movie houses at that time weren’t attached to a mall. They usually stood
alone like temples. In those days people were dependent on movies: It
was like a ritual for them. I went there with my grandparents and it was
like a daily activity. Today these cinemas are being demolished and that
tells us that our lifestyles have changed. But very few people think about
the changes of our lifestyles.
(Buchan 2010,1 emphasis added)

It’s a Dream plunges the spectator in the dim-lighted atmosphere of a disused

cinema slated for destruction. ‘In Kuching, Malaysia, there were two cinemas
next to my grand parents’ house, Tsai recalls … They were destroyed seven
or eight years ago. I still dream about these two cinemas today’ (quoted in
Xu 2007: 89). It is one of these dreams that Tsai shares with us: here he is, as
a young child, with his father, his already-old mother and his grandmother,
represented by a picture placed on one of the seats of the cinema. The film
ends with what is surely one of the longest fade-out in the history of cinema.
Over several minutes, the four characters sitting in the room dematerialize and
gradually disappear. Only the picture of the grandmother remains, remind-
ing us that, as Simon the Magician once stated, ‘if the mind doesn’t create

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Erik Bordeleau

2. Maybe this evolution itself as an image, it shall be annihilated like the rest of the world’ (quoted in
is only natural. In a
thought-provoking
Agamben 1998: 107).
analysis of the For Tsai, movie theatres no longer stand alone like temples. They are no
relation of cinema longer able to perform the quasi-sacred separation that once fostered his love
with museal spaces,
Thomas Elsaesser (2011: for cinema, and this epochal disappearance threatens the very possibility of
117) indeed suggests remembering and preserving the ‘golden era’ he experienced in his child-
that slow cinema is hood. Keeping up with Simon the Magician’s apocalyptic tone, Tsai recently
but a ‘musealization
of cinema’, already suggested the somehow paradoxical idea that ‘movies need to leave today’s
turning movie theatres in order to be resurrected’ (Buchan 2010). His statement was moti-
theatres into sites of
contemplation. Thanks
vated by what he perceives as the death of cinema as an art form, its progres-
to Nadin Mai for the sive demise in face of the increasing pressure coming from cinema as an
reference. entertainment industry. Following this logic, it is not surprising to observe
3. Interestingly enough, that Tsai Ming-Liang’s most recent cinema has developed in close relation-
Tsai (quoted in Vijn ship with museal spaces, or at least away from conventional movie studios,
2010) is prone to
highlight Europeans’ reinforcing in turn his steady commitment to the European tradition of art-
greater affinity with house cinema.2
the museal spaces: I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) for example was commissioned by
In Europe you are Vienna for the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; as for his
used to visiting last film, Face (2009), it was commissioned and co-produced by the Louvre
museums. You
learn that at a Museum, who invited Tsai to create the first opus of the ‘The Louvre Invites
young age, dragged Filmmakers’ collection, a series of works that are intended to renew our
along maybe by
either your parents,
understanding of one of the world’s greatest art collection. In a November
grandparents or 2009 interview with the French newspaper Libération, Tsai presented Face as
school. You think an expression of his ‘desire to go toward pure cinema’, underlining the fact
visiting a museum
is normal. But in that ‘the museum partly protects [him] against the immediacy that crushes
Asia, that is entirely films’ consumption’ (quoted in Azoury 2009). The museum for Tsai is both the
not the case. occasion for a freer artistic expression, and a unique shelter against oblivion.
4. The Xue Xue Institute Or as he nicely puts it: ‘gradually my movies find a home, and that is the
was founded in museum’ (Buchan 2010). Is not Tsai Ming-Liang thus figuring, for better and
September 2005. It is a
learning platform for for worse, as a paradigmatic art-house film-maker?3
creativity and culture,
hosting a wide variety
of creative practices.
Tsai’s cafe is mostly
Transductive sedentarity
attended by people
working in the building.
For whoever thinks by the middle, there is only ever the local.
Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery

I would like to further explore the domestic or oikological relation to the expo-
sitional museal space that characterizes Tsai’s most recent works through an
analysis of an unorthodox permanent video installation located at the Xue Xue
Institute in Taipei since June 2010.4 This installation includes his short feature
Moonlight on the River (2004) and Lee Kang-Sheng’s Remembrance (2009), but
also a branch of the Tsaileelu coffee shop he owns with two of his beloved
actors, a series of 49 chairs and seats gathered from all corners of Taiwan,
in-progress oil paintings of these same chairs and some prose and poetry
written on blackboard covering the cafe’s walls. The installation is intrinsi-
cally autobiographical and thoroughly nostalgic in tenor. All its elements
converge in expressing, in a disturbingly sentimentalist and ingenuous way,
especially for postcolonial academics trained to critically debunk any ‘essen-
tialist’ or ‘romantic’ modes of being, Tsai’s pressing concern for deep, locally
rooted affective attachments. Take the poem ‘Nostalgia of a coffee bean’ (‘Dou
de xiangchou’, 豆的乡愁) written by Lu Yi-Ching and figuring on one of the

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blackboards, which describes the world seen from the perspective of a coffee
bean as sentient being:

If I had known this would be my destiny

I think I would try hard to remember, memorizing
Every drop of encountering dew,
The passing-by of each flying bird,
Every cloud wandering with winds
If, if I had known
I would have breathed in more intensely,
the fragrance of homeland
And seared more thoroughly its colors.
Only – I know.
I know.
I am his, and theirs
everlasting mellowness
The fruit they will cherish forever.

Published in 2006, this poem is part of a poetry collection that simply bears
the name of Lu Yi-Ching’s former cafe address. This is where Lu and Tsai
met, years ago. On the blackboards of the installation’s cafe, we read the story
of their timely encounter: Tsai always sitting at the same place, with a pen
and some paper, constantly lost in his thoughts, fascinated by the wild taste
of Ethiopian Harar mocha coffee; then, after the closure of Lu’s cafe shop, his
painstaking attempts at finding another place ‘that has a soul’ as he himself
puts it, until he finally decides to open up the Tsaileelu coffee shop with Lu
and Lee. This cafe is still in operation today and has been immortalized in
Lee’s intimate short film Remembrance. It features Tsai sitting in the cafe at
night-time, after closure, listening to a tumultuous piano piece of Liszt, crying
bitterly the death of Lo Man-Fei (1955–2006), a famous Taiwanese dancer
and choreographer. The film attributes great importance to the production
process of coffee: the camera follows Lu while at work closing down the
place and roasting beans, and then immobilizes in a lengthy close-up on a
bubbling coffee cup infusing in the Japanese way (Figure 1). Later on, Lu and
Tsai engage in a beautiful improvised dance in the cafe, after which we see
an excerpt of Lo Man-Fei’s famous performance, in which she passionately
rotates on herself (the Chinese title of the movie is indeed Rotation, zi zhuan
自转). The film ends with Tsai’s departure, at dawn. The general impression
produced by the movie is one of soothing friendship and nostalgic meditation,
lingering lastingly afterwards in the viewer’s mind.
One of the principal challenges that this installation brings about is how
to give an account of the strong autobiographical and utterly vulnerable
dimension of this work without falling in the trap of the merely personal or
anecdotic on the one hand, and without giving way to the all-too-common
academic passion of disenchantment as a pseudo-political end in itself on
the other. In the terms of Stengers’ ecology of practices, no one is more
destructive and dangerous than who believes oneself to be ‘purely nomad’,
unaware of or reluctant to acknowledge his own forms of belonging – the
passion for disenchantment as a form of existential immunity for intellectuals,
for instance. Accordingly, I wish to resist to a certain ‘nomadic’ critical stance
and the temptation to sneer at Tsai’s nostalgic inclinations by presenting the

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Erik Bordeleau

5. Transduction is a key
concept of Simondon’s
ontogenetic philosophy
of individuation. For
Simondon, beings
‘do not possess a
unitary identity in a
stable state in which
no transformation
is possible; beings
possess transductive
unity’. Interestingly,
the concept of
transduction allows
for descriptions of
individuation processes
that directly involve
the observer. Indeed,
in a transductive
perspective, each
process of knowing
is itself a process of
individuation. That
is why for Simondon
transduction is also a
‘procedure of the mind
as it discovers. This
procedure consists in
following being in its
genesis, in carrying Figure 1: Filter coffee.
out the genesis of
thought at the same
time as the genesis of
the object is carried ‘domestic’ components of Tsai’s installation – among which the importance
out.’ In a quite literal
fashion, transduction
given to coffee, both as a collective place and as a ritual beverage – as core
is but a material elements for a potentially transformative or transductive experience5 of his
intro-duction, an active work. Or to put it in another words, I wish to produce a cosmopolitical read-
‘mattering’ beyond
representations – une ing of Tsai’s work, mainly inspired by Isabelle Stengers’ reading of Deleuze
entrée en matière. Both and Guattari’s idea of the nomad and the sedentary, focusing more specifi-
quotes are cited by cally on what she calls the sedentary component of practices.
Muriel Combes (2013:
6–7). One of Deleuze and Guattari’s most influential contributions to contempo-
rary thought certainly resides in their passionate plea for de-territorialization
6. Bernard Aspe’s Les
mots et les actes (2011), and the production of nomadic subjectivities. In the Treaty of Nomadology, for
is certainly one of instance, they successfully produce a suggestive contrast in nature between
the most stimulating
attempts to date to
the state’s centralizing mode of operation and the nomadic modes of exist-
think what a ‘true’ ence, with its war machines, ambulant sciences and itinerant followings of the
political subjectivation matter flows. However, this image of nomadic thought has often been reduced
consists of. Of
particular interest is his to a simple model of infinite mobility or circulation, becoming easily confused
critique of speculative with today’s imperative to adapt and comply with the market forces. Here,
constructivism, based one might think of Zizek’s well-known critique of Deleuze, who provocatively
on a strong distinction
between the political wonders if he should not finally be best thought of as the ultimate ideolo-
subject and what he gist of late capitalism rather than a subversive thinker. In a world whose very
calls the subject of
economy. Aspe argues
principle is constant self-revolutionizing, argues Zizek, the critic of capitalism
that speculative from a stable ethical position is more necessary than ever, but appears to be
constructivism, for as an exception (Zizek 2004: 183–87). This call for a stable ethical and political
critical as it pretends to
be, ultimately cannot stance against capitalism is usually grounded, like in the work of Badiou for
break free from the instance, in a strong theory of the (communist) subject.6
regime of economy, Against the vulgar idea of nomadism as simple de-territorializing move-
because it is unable to
give a proper account ment or, worst, commercial circulation, but without committing to a full-
of the dimension fledged communist subjective immobilization, I would therefore like to
of the Act and its
relation to the Real.
lay stress on the fact that the itinerant modes of being of, whom Deleuze

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 Soulful sedentarity

and Guattari call, in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘the people of relayers’ essentially For Aspe, Deleuzian
de-territorialization,
require the fabrication of always relative material localities. I would thus like or the call for
to conceive of Tsai Ming-Liang’s art practice as primarily concerned with the schizophrenia
production of such localized relays, presenting Tsai’s cafe shop and installa- as a post-human
transformative process,
tion as qualified spaces of encounter that are all but ‘anywhere’ and which can remains essentially
potentially shelter renewed affective territorializations. creative or spiritual
All in all, my approach to Tsai’s work is less that of an art critique than a in scope and thus
captive of the cultural
kind of offbeat anthropology of the cultural interstices. In a way, I approach economy regime (he
this installation as a sort of poetic and collective attempt at affective and uses the word oeuvre
to characterize this
artistic territory formation, aiming at the imaginal point where the distinction realm). Basically,
between life and art vanishes. In the last instance, what I am concerned with for Aspe, Deleuze
here is to present a processual and non-substantialist reading of what could and Guattari’s
de-territorializations do
broadly be defined as Tsai’s care for his soul – that is, what he deems to be the not qualify as political
most vulnerable and valuable dimension of his art practice and that which acts proper, as they
coincides with what he is most afraid of losing in contact with the globalized principally relate to the
relatively autonomous
neo-liberal world as he experiences it. In other words, my aim is to envisage realm of Art or ‘oeuvre’.
Tsai’s art practice as an active/transductive display of his soul. Methodologically For more on this
subject, see Aspe and
speaking, in the perspective of transcultural ecology of media practices, Bordeleau (2012).
I believe that, following Stengers (2011: 371),

such things must be expressed in the language of the practitioner who

experiences them … The idiom and the factish affirm the territory. We
can never fully understand another’s dreams, hopes, doubts, and fears,
in the sense that an exact translation could be provided, but we are still
transformed as they pass into our experience. The experience is one of
a deterritorialization that is ignored by the byways of criticism, a ‘trans-
ductive’ experience without which all criticism is a judgment and a
disqualification.

What is at stake here is therefore not to draw a definite line between a ‘good’
traditional sedentary and the ‘bad’ modern nomad – all the more so within Tsai’s
own work! As Stengers (2011: 364) carefully points out, ‘it is not a question of
identifying “nomadic” and “sedentary” individuals but of identifying them only
in relation to a given interaction, of creating a contrast whose scope does not
exceed that interaction’. In the last instance, the question here is, I would like to
argue, to what extent an artistic practice can be morphed into a de-territorializ-
ing figure of thought, and where inversely we should be content to simply dwell
in its proximity, as it lays in the disclosure of its own being, between rising and
sheltering, as a well-known apologist of the truth of the work of art would say.

The sedentary component of practices

The concept of the sedentary component of practice works as a technical speci-
fication for the experience of désoeuvrement or inoperativeness at the core of
Tsai’s work. In Stengers’ book To Be Done with Tolerance (1997/2003), this
concept refers to an essential dimension of the mode of existence and enjoy-
ment of one’s own practice: in short, the sedentary component concerns what
literally im-ports or matters. In Stengers’ constructivist optic, it is what comes
closer to what others, like Foucault or Agamben, would call, after Hegel, an
ethical substance. In the perspective of an ecology of practices that promotes
transductive experiences of de-territorialization, the sedentary component refers
to the interiority of a fold, a minima of belonging, a threshold of territoriality,

185
Erik Bordeleau

a differential vulnerability – that is, a soul – that constitutes itself as a practical

limit against the destructiveness of generalized equivalence. The affirmation of
the sedentary component of a practice opposes the modernist and hegemonic
understanding of economics: all things – all practices – are not equal!

Whoever is engaged in an activity such that ‘all ways of doing are not
equivalent’ is, in this sense, a practitioner. This means of course that an
economic order in which it is normal to ‘sell one’s own workforce’ is an
order dedicated to destroy practices.
(Stengers 2006: 160)

In the perspective of Stengers’ speculative constructivism, each experience is to

be conceived in the full affirmative deployment of what is important for itself.
In her idiom, this amounts to saying that practices are by nature divergent:

The way a practice, a mode of life or a being diverge designates what is

important to them, in a sense that is not subjective but constitutive – if
what is important to them can’t be made important, they will be muti-
lated or destroyed.
(Stengers 2009: 146)

Following Deleuze’s use of the term, Stengers often describes practitioners

as ‘idiots’, a provocative yet utterly positive characterization that emphasizes
the minoritarian dimension of practices. The idiot is the conceptual figure of
resistance par excellence: he ‘is the one who always slows the others down,
who resists the consensual way in which the situation is presented and in
which emergencies mobilize thought or action’ (Stengers 2005: 996). The idiot
does not resist for the sake of resisting: as practitioner, she is simply in her
element, ‘à son affaire’, absorbed by her matter of concern in ways that are
never reducible to any common good. The idiot is but another way of affirm-
ing the radical locality or mattering of practices: ‘As Deleuze wrote, an idea
always exists as engaged in a matter – that is, as “mattering.” A problem is
always a practical problem, never a universal problem mattering for every-
body. Learning is always local’ (Stengers 2010: 28). As practitioner, the idiot’s
language thus tends to move away from any ideal of transparency or public
intelligibility, towards semi-private and highly personalized ‘idioms’ which
are not designed to achieve unanimity or universally valid claims.
Such emphasis on the idiotic singularity of practices and their relative exte-
riority to one another brings forth their vulnerability. Stengers aims at a specu-
lative eco-relational model of understanding in which every single practice can
relate to one another without ‘losing grip (perdre prise)’ on what is vital for its
own existence. It is in that sense that she can say that ‘what is of value must first
be defined as vulnerable’ (Stengers 2009: 135), a formula that resumes Stengers’
mode of dramatization of thought as well as her political modus operandi.
One of the main interests of Stengers’ discussion of the sedentary prin-
ciple is that it is grounded in a cosmopolitical reflection oriented by what
she calls the ‘eventuality of peace’, that is, not a regulation or pacification of
practices, but their harmonious convergence as a speculative possibility. Of
particular interest is her concern for the fragile singularity of practices, and
how it might be compromised if they are forced to ‘expose’ themselves in
improper conditions. As she discusses the conditions of representation in her
hypothetical parliament of things, the main challenge of the cosmopolitical

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proposal becomes thus to acknowledge the ‘presence of the sedentary as such’

(Stengers 2011: 395), which are usually left in the shadow and do not appear
on the political scene. If politics for Stengers is a contingent practice that
necessarily involves a certain degree of exposure or representation, it is only
in the cosmopolitical horizon that we can imagine a world in which each and
every singular and shadowy sedentarity would be peacefully saved as such.
We are now in a better position to understand how Stengers revisits Deleuze
and Guattari’s nomad/sedentary doublet, unexpectedly emphasizing the seden-
tary component of practices: Stengers’ emphasis on oikos, domus or sedentarity
must be understood in its most literal sense, that is, as relative to ethos, a way
of being through which one ‘in-habits’ and produces an existential territory.
In the chapter ‘Of the Refrain’ of A Thousand Plateaus, this idea is expressed in
terms of protecting germinal forces and producing intensive territories through
some sort of domestic mannerism – ‘mannerism: the ethos is both Abode and
manner, homeland and style’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 320). Let us now try
to see how this applies to Tsai Ming-Liang’s art practice.

Idiorythmic interruption

In your patience you shall possess your souls.

Luke 21:19

Tsai’s use of coffee in his installation displays a quite disturbing level of

domestic vulnerability. It is, following Deleuze’s and Stengers’ use of the term,
profoundly ‘idiotic’. How should we deal, for example, with Tsai’s ingenuous
claim that the coffee he sells in his installations, in contrast with so many
other merchants of the global economy, is a coffee that has a soul? And what
difference does it make anyway? I think that Stengers’ cosmopolitical perspec-
tive and the concept of sedentary component of practices allow us to take Tsai
at his word, by literally identifying this ‘soul’ as what is most vulnerable – and
therefore important – in his art practice. Here, art does become a way to draw
ethical and oikological lines of life, tracing a horizon in which ethos and oikos
become indiscernible.
As seen earlier, and as he himself acknowledges, Tsai’s art practice seems
to require a protected museal space in order to flourish. If directly exposed
to the market forces, its soulful sedentary component indeed seems deemed
to perish. The eventuality of peace inherent to the cosmopolitical perspective
suggests a ‘cosmic’ horizon in which this vulnerable practice can be thought
and ‘saved’ as such. In this light, the museal space appears as a particular
oikological niche that allows for Tsai’s practice to diverge at will. However,
if we insist too much on the vulnerability of Tsai’s practice, we run the risk
of conceiving it simply as a weak practice. The political dimension of the
cosmopolitical proposal nonetheless requires that we conceive of Tsai’s prac-
tice essentially in the perspective of its active divergence, that is, as a force. In
order to pinpoint the force of Tsai’s practice, we might borrow a key concept
from Roland Barthes’ 1976 lecture at the Collège de France entitled ‘How to
Live Together’. Barthes’ lecture is organized around the concept-phantasm
of idiorythm, which, as its etymology indicates, suggests the possibility for
a living being to live according to its own rhythm, resisting to the heterono-
mies and other forced synchronizations of power. This use of the prefix idio-
corresponds exactly with Deleuze’s and Stengers’ use of the term. In this

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Erik Bordeleau

sense, I would now like to suggest that Tsai’s soulful practice is best conceived
not only as a potentially vulnerable practice, but also as an active micro-politi-
cal intervention of an idiorythmic type, able to produce interstices from which
to inflect – and perhaps slow down – the global mobilization that tends to
synchronize the gestures and rhythms of our contemporaries. As we will now
see, coffee thus becomes for Tsai a key sedentary element for the transfor-
mation of his video installations into potentially interruptive, time-stopping
spaces of encounter.
Those who are familiar with Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinema know that it is
particularly critical of the form of isolation and affective miseries produced by
the global economic development. In a recent conference given at National
Central University (NCU) in Taiwan in May 2010, Tsai shared his rather pessi-
mistic view on our contemporary world that reveals his concerns for ecologi-
cal (and spiritual) conservation:

Life is business, life is competition. We see how the directors squeeze

themselves only to produce box-office success. We see how the poli-
ticians intend to persuade people that economic development should
come first, regardless of the fact that the ozone layer is getting thinner
and thinner as global warming becomes more and more serious, and
that the earth cannot withstand more exploitation. In this weakened
environment, an era of recycling is coming. I think everything should be
stopped, including my lecture here, my movie production, everything.
(Tsai 2011)

Tsai’s quasi-apocalyptic idea of interruption is an essential component of

what I have elsewhere called his conservative filmic gesture (Bordeleau 2012).
He doesn’t simply wish to stop the destructive processes related to global
mobilization; in a way, he effectively manages to do so. The fundamentally
un-dramatic slowness that characterizes Tsai’s cinema radically questions our
constituent relationship both with images and with the disappearing spaces
of global capitalism. In his movies, the spectator is often taken into a kind of
pre-apocalyptic idleness, as if the world had suddenly stopped and remained
suspended. Sometimes, the situation is explicitly catastrophic: for instance,
in The Hole (1998), where, at the turn of the millennium, a mysterious virus
that changes humans into cockroaches decimates the population; or in the
Wayward Cloud (2005), in which the whole island of Taiwan falls prey to a
harsh drought. In I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), reality even goes beyond
fiction: a thick cloud of smoke coming from the (very real) destruction of
the neighbouring Indonesian forests envelops the city of Kuala Lumpur and
condemns its inhabitants to a slow suffocation. Tsai magnificently integrates
this unexpected event into his poetry of relational paralysis and urban destruc-
tion, which are recurrent themes throughout his work. One might think of the
final scene of Vive l’amour (1994) among others, where the disconsolate and
solitary Mei is seen crossing the Da’an Park in Taipei, which, at the time of
the shooting, had been reduced to an almost lunar no-man’s-land following a
highly controversial urban development project.
However, if the idea of a radical or quasi-apocalyptic interruption of the
world’s current destructive course is crucial in Tsai’s work, how exactly does
it relate with the idea of ‘recycling’ mentioned in the earlier quotation? If we
follow Tsai’s own words, it seems like it is a matter of ‘putting things back in
use’. Interestingly enough, this idea directly involves that of making coffee:

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Making coffee is also part of my work. It started out when one of my 7. Translation: ‘Love
endures the risk of
friends encouraged me to open a coffee shop after I made coffee for destroying the very
him. So I did. And now it is an integral part of the installation. I held on soul that shelters it.’
to one philosophy when I opened my shop, that is, I did not care much
about sales records, nor about how much I sell. What matters most is to
know what exactly I am selling. The coffee I sell is also food for thought,
and I guarantee you, it’s delicious homemade coffee. If you visit the
exhibition, you will understand why I have integrated the process of
brewing coffee. It is part of the recycling concept: nothing in our life
should be tossed away easily. Ultimately, I want to put everything back in
use. I cannot emphasize on this more.
(Tsai 2011)

It is not all that clear how the process of brewing coffee in an art installation
evokes the idea of recycling. Is Tsai implicitly referring to the fact that coffee,
as an organic substance, eventually returns to nature through biodegradation?
As for Tsai’s insistence on the idea of use, perhaps it can be best understood
in the light of the concept of usus pauper as developed within the Franciscan
tradition, often referred to as a model challenging the modes of production
based on private property. But in that case, one cannot help but envisaging a
quite obvious paradox: how can the expositional space, a separated space by
definition, possibly serve to put something back in use? Or again: how can it
be envisaged as a recycling space, when its primary function is to dis-play, and
thus to put out of circulation? But perhaps here we are not taking the problem
sufficiently from the middle, where everything becomes a localized matter, or
a matter of locality; perhaps the ideal transductive point of view from which to
comprehend Tsai’s installation work is indeed that of the poetic coffee bean –
or, better still, that of images proper, as we shall now see.

Mattering time through images

L’amour se met au risque de la destruction de l’âme qui l’abrite.

Rûmî, Soleil du réel7

For those familiar with Tsai’s art practice, it is perhaps not surprising that this
attempt to think of the sedentary component of his work and his relation to the
expositional space has brought us to the threshold of a somehow dislocating
and dislocated stillness. Like his films, Tsai’s installation lay bare the relation
between time and space, attentively configuring it as an occasion for singular
and timely encounters. On the sixth floor of the Xue Xue Institute, located in
the heart of Neihu, an elegant hi-tech financial and technological neighbour-
hood, sharing space with graphic designers, architects and other creative work-
ers of the new economy, the multifaceted installation benefits from a long,
curved bay window that offers a breathtaking view of the serpentine Jilong
river. Anybody who wants to relax and appreciate the landscape while sipping a
cup of Tsaileelu’s soulful coffee can sit on one of the 49 old chairs and armchairs
that Tsai has gathered from all corners of Taiwan. For a moment, time stops, as
one watches Taipei’s skyline, mountains and ever-going traffic from the peace-
ful haven. Perhaps Tsai was right: come enjoy and you will understand …
With its humble sedentary minimalism, Tsai’s installation resonates with
Alfred North Whitehead’s luminous account of time, space and deity: ‘Time

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Erik Bordeleau

8. In ‘The Game of refers to the transition process, “space” refers to the static necessity of each
Knowing How to Look’,
the artist and painter
form of interwoven existence, and “deity” expresses the lure of the ideal which
Antoni Tapiès (2011: is the potentiality beyond immediate fact’ (Whitehead 1968: 101). If the possi-
81–82) expresses a bility of encounter operates as a lure for feeling activating Tsai’s work, and
similar concern with
worn-down chairs as if the disposition of chairs in the expositional space works as an exemplary
occasions for soulful static/sedentary component, how is the passage of time as a transition proc-
perceptual encounters: ess made present? Or to put it another way: how does Tsai ‘matter’ time? When
Everything, I visited the installation, which had opened up a few days earlier, alongside
everything shares some of the chairs there was their oil-painted reflection. From the beginning,
life and has its
importance! Even Tsai has announced his intention to realize an oil painting of each of the forty-
the most worn nine chairs, thus giving to see what he calls a ‘spiritual dialectics’ between the
down chair carries
inside the initial
virtual of the image and the actual chair (xu 虚 and shi 实). This attempt at
force of the sap revealing the chair’s ‘charm’ or ‘aura’ (feng hua, 风华) contributes in no small
climbing from the part to the general aim of the installation, which is, in Tsai’s own words, to
earth, out there in
the forest, and will express and bring forth ‘progressive present tense’ (jin xing shi, 进行式). Here,
still be useful the one cannot help but think of the fade-out sequence of It’s a Dream or the
day when, broken sequence in the empty cinema of Goodbye, Dragon Inn discussed earlier. In
into kindling, it
burns in some both cases, the extreme stillness of the frame allows for the slow emergence
fireplace. of the temporality of things proper. And here again, by painting each of the
chairs, Tsai patiently di-stillates their own singular, inescapable time. Each
chair-image appears as a timely pause of its own, a potential time relay or an
encounter to come, in a world accelerating recklessly.8
In the end, as apocalyptic and interruptive as Tsai Ming-Liang’s art prac-
tice might be, there is a more encompassing idea that ultimately commands his
work: that of the impermanence of all things. It is from the perspective of imper-
manence that Tsai conceives the essence of his creation and its relation to life,
which in turn perhaps suggests that it is the proper ‘cycle’ in the idea of recy-
cling which, in the end, matters most to him. In a discussion of Face, he states:

As lots of people have said, it is a self-portrait. I processed it with exactly

the conception of self-portrait. Of course, it is full of my reflections on
life and on creation; the movie is indeed about the relation between life
and creation. And what on earth is the essence of them both? It’s nothing
but uncontrollability, impermanence. People cannot stop themselves from
getting old, nor avoiding death. It’s always random and unpredictable.
It is indeed an endless circle. You contemplate in this circle the mean-
ing of life. Soon you’ll notice what has gone will always return. But no
matter how many times it returns, you can never gain control over it.
(Tsai 2011)

Impermanence is but another name for progressive present tense. It is a Buddhist

concept that insists on the un-dramatic temporality of our being-there, on the
sheer phenomenality of passage. I suggested above that Tsai’s soul was to be
conceived as what is most vulnerable in his art practice, what was most suscep-
tible of being lost if not (spatially) protected adequately. This in turn has allowed
me to pay closer attention to the sedentary and oikological aspects of Tsai’s art
practice, and then to present it as a potentially interruptive idiorythmic force in
a world threatened by global mobilization. In guise of conclusion, I would now
like to add one last element to the characterization of Tsai’s soulful art practice,
by focusing on its relation to the passage of time – to present time.
Gilbert Simondon once suggested that soul is the present of being. By
that he meant that the soul’s drama concerns the ways by which it can dwell

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 Soulful sedentarity

in a present that can never be taken for granted. In other words, to have a
soul means first and foremost to deal with the problem of how to inhabit the
present. This soulful tension runs deep in all of Tsai’s work, from his numerous
attempts at filming disappearing spaces up to his claim that movies need to
leave today’s theatres in order to be resurrected. In that sense, Tsai’s images are
clearly meant to be more than simply beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. They
should rather be conceived of as expressions of a constantly renewed attempt
to inhabit an ever-changing world in the present tense. In that sense, Tsai’s
images are transductive: they matter time. This last expression seems to work as
an inward description, so to speak: images that im-port time, images that bring
time to a sort of subjective end, images informing a form-of-life. Inversely, we
could say that Tsai exposes his soul by expressing the passage of time. This second
formulation seems more adapted to evoke Tsai’s care for impermanence.
Tsai insists that the Xue Xue video installation is about showing the
progressive present tense. But it could easily be argued that, like most of his
works, it first and foremost expresses a nostalgic ‘regressive’ tense – one of
many passionate attempts at seizing disappearance in the flesh, standing on
the threshold where space inexorably becomes time. Nowhere is it more the
case than in Moonlight on the River, arguably one of the most beautiful and
hypnotic love letters ever ‘filmed’. Rarely has a movie indulged in such delicate
or pathic sentimentality – a sheer expression of nostalgia. At dawn, two dogs
freely pursue each other on the Danshui riverbanks (Figure 2). The camera
follows their every movement from afar. It is about all that will be shown for
the entire duration of the movie, except for a picture of Tsai and Lee at the
very end. In voice-off, Tsai reads, in a collected and monotonous tone:

Here. This is our Danshui river. This is our Danshui river. I was here
once, shooting a scene for ‘the river’. Xiao Kang was floating in the

Figure 2: Moonlight on the River.

191
Erik Bordeleau

water. He was in the water for a very long time. He was floating in the
stinking water for a very long time. He was a ‘floating corpse’. A lot of
onlookers were there.

The river. This is the location where I filmed The River. Much earlier
on, much earlier on, I shot my first TV drama here too. The water is
running scarcer and scarcer now. The river bed recedes further and
further away. Before, the riverbed didn’t recede so far away during the
low tide. Before, it rained more often in Taipei. Now it seldom rains. The
whole river almost dries up now.

Xiao Kang and I brought our camera here. Hope to record something
for you. What we see here reflects the feeling in our heart.
I miss all this so much.
I miss this river so much. Like I miss yesterday. And I miss this wonder-
ful world. It was a wonderful world before.
And I miss you too …

The film is addressed to Simon Field, a film producer whom Tsai and Lee had
met at the Rotterdam film festival. It is titled after a song performed by Li Xiang
Lan, a famous romantic pop singer of the 1950s of the kind Tsai is so fond of.
The song is played in its entirety following Tsai’s amorous monologue; it is a
delightfully melancholic love song, a ‘song from the opposite riverside’ as it
goes, relating the sorrow of two separated lovers. Moonlight on the River is a
film about a world going missing: a film about the end of a world, a wonderful
yet disappearing world. Notice how localized the film is, how tenuous the link
to present time is. The image of chasing dogs on the riverbank at dawn is the
only thing that anchors the viewer in the present. Everything else is reced-
ing, like the water of the Danshui, this water that runs through all of Tsai’s
film and which is his paramount symbol for love. But there it is, images of an
all so natural love affair between two careless stray dogs, sheer anonymous
desire attracting two errant bodies in the all-renewing light of dawn. There
are lovers in the morning, and they are leaning out for love; they will lean that
way forever, while Tsai holds the (camera) mirror …
Moonlight on the River could be read as a more or less symptomatic inca-
pacity to ‘move on’ in an ever-changing world. But it is precisely the drama of
a soul in search of its present that would be missed by such an approach. The
potentially transductive experience Tsai’s film conveys involves that of a loss:
an experience of loss understood as a choked passage towards some indefinite
and ever singular present. It is this proper soulful ‘moving on’ that Tsai’s art
practice exposes in all its singular, touching materiality.
In ‘Survivance des lucioles’, a brilliant essay discussing Agamben, Debord
and Passolini’s apocalyptic tone, George Didi-Huberman asks, in the wake of
Aristotle: can being only be said in the past tense? In an age furiously drawn forward
and blindly celebrating all possible becomings and novelties, the question
requires us to slow down a little, in order to hear what ‘being’ might actually
mean. Tsai Ming-Liang’s work performs such a slowing down. Over and over,
it reiterates its own possible answer to the question of being, more often than
not with inescapable nostalgia, a word whose equivalent in Mandarin would
be xiangchou, 乡愁, an expression that suggests a ‘burning’, heartfelt preoc-
cupation (chou) for the local, the homeland (xiang). In the conceptual frame

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 Soulful sedentarity

developed in this article, such an answer could be thus formulated: oikologi-

cally localized affective attachments striving for their soulful present. In Tsai’s
own sentimental and poetic way, it might simply be ‘I miss all this so much’.
Sometimes, Tsai’s nostalgic overtones tend to blend with a quite pessi-
mistic, quasi-apocalyptic take on the world. This should not be dismissed
too easily, as it is undoubtedly a crucial dimension of his political stance with
respect to the present state of affairs. His privileged relation to museal spaces,
among other things, bears the mark of an acute understanding of how his
work needs to be sheltered against the destructiveness of today’s market
forces. Nonetheless, and to put it in the most succinct terms, I think that the
idea of impermanence ultimately prevails in his work. In the margins of the
grandiose visions of radical destruction and the corresponding devouring clar-
ity of apocalyptic truth that fuels Hollywood’s mega-productions, Tsai’s art
practice proposes his own dim-lighted and soulful variations on a world both
in perpetual disappearance and renewing, softly evoking ‘these little survivals
that we experience, here and there, in the journey through the selva obscura,
as multiple glimmers of light through which hope and memory address their
signals to each other’ (Didi-Huberman 2010: 67).

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Suggested citation
Bordeleau, E. (2013), ‘Soulful sedentarity: Tsai Ming-Liang at home at the
museum’, Studies in European Cinema, 10: 2+3, pp. 179–194, doi: 10.1386/
seci.10.2-3.179_1

Contributor details
Erik Bordeleau is postdoctoral fellow at Brussels Free University and lecturer at
UQAM (Montreal). He is the author of Foucault anonymat (Le Quartanier, 2012,
Eva-Legrand 2013 award) and of Comment sauver le commun du communisme?
(Le Quartanier, 2014, forthcoming). He is interested in the current specula-
tive turn in contemporary thought and is currently working on the mode of
presence of spirits, gods and other surexistential forces in Taiwanese cinema.
He is part of the Sense Lab, a collective interested in event design practices and
research-creation and of Épopée, an action group in cinema which directed
Insurgence (2012), a movie about Quebec’s recent student strikes.
E-mail: erik.bordeleau@gmail.com

Erik Bordeleau has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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