11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

theatre school. It examines personal tensions brewing during the production of a play, before daringly showing the completed from beginning to end, tilting the axis of the entire film. Hamaguchi’s canvas expanded further with Happy Hour 2015, a five-hour intimate epic that chronicles the lives of four women in their thirties. The film took shape through months of workshops with the actors, whose characters gradually formed across the extended rehearsals of the production. With its layered portraits and formidable run time, Happy Hour became Hamaguchi’s international breakthrough, receiving accolades at festivals around the world. The film was funded by individual donors and this unconventional financing produced another work by the director just one year later: the cryptic ghost story Heaven is Still Far Away 2016, perhaps the greatest film to be created as a reward for crowdfunding campaign donors. After the Palme d’Or-nominated doppelganger romance Netemo sametemo ( Asako I & II ) 2018, Hamaguchi secured his place as a major figure of contemporary cinema with the release of his Haruki Murakami short-story adaptation Drive My Car 2021 and the triptych anthology Gūzen to Sōzō ( Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy ) 2021. Both films were widely celebrated, with Drive My Car winning numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and becoming a crossover commercial hit. In the wake of the success of Drive My Car , many expected Hamaguchi to turn to Hollywood or Europe for the next phase of his career; instead, he scaled down. His subsequent film Aku wa sonzai shinai ( Evil Does Not Exist ) 2023 is a transfixing, lo-fi drama about a rural Japanese town dealing with growing intrusions from avaricious city slickers. The film developed from a request from Eiko Ishibashi, the composer of Drive My Car , who asked Hamaguchi to create a video for her upcoming concert tour. Their conversations grew so rich and detailed that he expanded the idea into Evil Does Not Exist . From the footage shot for that feature, he edited the dialogue-free audiovisual work Gift 2023, which Ishibashi accompanies exclusively in live performances. Such a dynamic approach is typical of Ryusuke Hamaguchi — he is forever twisting and turning the language of cinema, always finding ways to render the old new again. TSAI MING-LIANG, MALAYSIAB.1957 A major figure of the renowned Taiwan New Cinema, Malaysian-born Tsai Ming-liang’s films transcend formal boundaries, increasingly drawing on his practice as an acclaimed video artist to devise new ways of conceiving cinema. Born in Kuching, Tsai spent much of his childhood in his hometown’s movie houses with his grandparents, developing an ardent love of film. Tsai moved to Taipei at the age of 20, and after working in theatre and television for several years made his feature debut with the enthralling portrait of urban ennui, Qingshaonian Nuozha ( Rebels of the Neon God ) 1992. Produced shortly after the end of martial law in Taiwan, the ambling narrative of Rebels of the Neon God follows the intersecting paths of a group of disaffected young people in Taipei. Although less formally rigorous than his later works, the film established many of the leitmotivs of Tsai’s oeuvre. His characters inhabit the fringes of a metropolis, surrounded by people yet deeply alone in their rituals, while his camera holds a contemplative gaze that requires the audience to reset the rhythms of their viewing. The film also heralded the emergence of Tsai's muse and inseparable collaborator, the actor Lee Kang-sheng. The enigmatic Lee is a singularity of cinema. With his beguiling, youthful face and gentle movements, he looks and moves like no other screen presence. Discovered by Tsai outside a video game arcade, the actor has appeared in all the director’s features, as well as many of his short films, and the two live together in Taipei’s mountainous outskirts. Tsai has gone so far as to assert that his raison d’être as a filmmaker has become to simply document the changes in Lee’s face and body as he ages — an ongoing study of the passage of time. After the adolescent restlessness depicted in Rebels of the Neon God , Tsai found widespread acclaim with Ai qing wan sui ( Vive L’amour ) 1994, which was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival. Like its predecessor, it is a story of people longing for connection, where incommunicability is intertwined with the coldness of the city. With this film, the director’s takes grew longer, the dialogue increasingly sparse, and the bursts of humour more surreal. It also confirmed Tsai as a key voice of the Taiwan New Cinema, alongside such pre-eminent figures as Edward Yang (1947–2007) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (b.1947). In subsequent films, Tsai honed his style further, taking careful composition and hypnotic pacing to new extremes. He began incorporating both biographical and autobiographical elements into his narratives, rendering the cinematic highly personal. In He liu ( The River ) 1997, Lee Kang-sheng’s real-life physical ailments are used in the film’s narrative, while Visage ( Face ) 2009 is the Louvre-funded story of a Taiwanese filmmaker shooting a film in that museum. Tsai also plays with genre, introducing fantastical musical interludes into his films Dong ( The Hole ) 1998 and Tian bian yi duo yun ( The Wayward Cloud ) 2005. Tsai’s shift to digital cinematography with Jiao you ( Stray Dogs ) 2013 rid him of the technical constraints of analogue film, allowing shots to to extend to previously unfeasible lengths in his pursuit of a new kind of observational cinema. With Tsai’s career extending into its fourth decade, ageing has become a preoccupation for the director, with films such as Rizi ( Days ) 2020 documenting his shifting relationship with the human body in a manner that is both open and empathetic. Since the start of the new millennium, Tsai has cultivated a parallel career as a celebrated video artist, whose work has been commissioned by major art institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris. As his feature films grow increasingly experimental, their language has become imbricated with that of his video works. Most prominent among these is his ‘Walker’ series, which began in 2012 and is now in its tenth iteration. Featuring Lee Kang-sheng as a robed monk walking at a spellbindingly slow pace amid the chaos of a bustling urban centre, the series was inspired by the historical travelling monk Xuanzang. Embracing a radical NOTES 1 Gemma Gracewood, ‘The mysteries of women: Kamila Andini on the haunted intimacy of Before, Now & Then ’ [interview], Letterboxd , 23 August 2023, <letterboxd.com/journal/before- now-then-kamila-andini-interview>, viewed June 2024. 2 Popular in Indonesia, kretek cigarettes comprise tobacco mixed with cloves and other spices and flavours. 3 Suharto’s New Order refers to the regime of the second Indonesian President Suharto (1921–2008), from his rise to power in 1966 until his resignation in 1998. 4 Phil Hoad, ‘“The script is a vehicle”: Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Drive My Car ’, Guardian , 12 November 2021, <theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/12/the-script-is-a- vehicle-japanese-director-ryusuke-hamaguchi-on-drive-my- car>, viewed June 2024. Production still from 悪は存在しない ( Evil Does Not Exist ) 2023 / Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi / Digital, colour, stereo, 106 minutes, Japan, Japanese (English subtitles) / Image courtesy: Hi Gloss Entertainment re-conception of time, space and stillness, these films exemplify Tsai’s place as one of cinema’s inimitable artists. These directorial surveys provide rare opportunities to follow the winding paths of three major contemporary filmmakers. Much like Kamila Andini’s film Before, Now & Then , these programs collapse the past and present, showcasing the rich work of these artists while revealing where their personal visions of cinema may lead into the future. ROBERTHUGHES CINEMA 230 — 231 ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL