Marginalized Sexuality in Tsai Ming Liang's Cinema

Repeated viewings of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming Liang's films never fail to inspire more questions than answers. Celebrated as one of the greatest living directors in numerous international film festivals, yet often denounced in his home base of Taiwan for misrepresenting or even reifying contemporary social ailments, Tsai is renowned for his contemplative yet provocative investigations of social, sexual, and cultural border crossings. His reception in recent academic scholarship in Chinese-language cinema studies is equally divided. Described by some as an avant-gardist in search of alternative modes of everyday survival for marginalized social figures, but by others as producing a self-serving “cinema of disillusionment,” only one aspect of his films is agreed upon: the freedom it imparts upon the spectator through lyrical and sympathetic, yet frequently ambivalent portraits of social marginalization

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Art history · Contemplation · Epistemology · Human sexuality · Media studies · Movie theater · Political science · Portrait · Psychoanalysis · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology