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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
Tsai Ming-Liang’s most recent cinema has developed in close relationship with
museal spaces. His last film, Face (2009), was commissioned and co-produced by
the Louvre Museum, which invited Tsai to create the first opus of the ‘The Louvre
Invites Filmmakers’ collection, a series of works that are intended to renew our under-
standing of one of the world’s greatest art collections. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum
has also recently added Tsai Ming-Liang’s ‘It’s a Dream’ (2007), a nostalgic and
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.
kEywordS
Tsai Ming-Liang
Isabelle Stengers
slow cinema
existential territory
cosmopolitics
transductive experience