Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist 

TSAI Ming-Liang, like a pilgrim or farmer, cultivates his artistic language between detachment from and engagement with the world. Over thirteen years of dedicated commitment, he has focused on his personal motif, allowing his creative work to branch out organically without bowing to international curatorial trends, fully manifesting the obsessive creativity of an artist. Employing ritualistic language and texts imbued with a religious hue without regressing art to supernatural shamanism or borrowing jargon like “spirituality” or “fieldwork,” the exhibition displays a robust artistic vocabulary that enables the work to emanate a mana-like energy. The curator threads the project meticulously, helping the artist collate thirteen years of documents and tease out the creative context. The finishing touch is the spatial arrangement, which cleverly overlays the temporalities of the films, installations, and performance art, enabling viewers to fully perceive the spiritual path of the “walker.” (Commentator / WU Yi-Hua)

Artwork Introduction  

For over a decade, The Walker series has served as a distinct creative path for TSAI Ming-Liang outside his feature filmmaking. It not only connects to his early engagement with performance art but also allows his work to continue expanding across multiple locations. Footprints of the Walker: Tsai Ming-Liang brings together new works and manuscripts, creating a unified image field with multiple screens and objects. This exhibition showcases over a decade of creative development and marks Tsai’s shift from cinema to transmedia practice. It also features the most extensive collection of the Slow Walk series to date and highlights a key moment in his ongoing effort to foster dialogue between cinema and art museums.

About the Artist 

TSAI Ming-Liang was born in Malaysia in 1957 and began his creative journey in Taiwan. In 1994, he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Vive L’amour, which established his global reputation. He has continued to expand his cinematic language through The River, Face, and other works. In recent years, he has also explored contemporary art, introducing concepts such as “Hand-sculpted Cinema” and “Removal of Industrial Processes from Art Making.” In 2012, he launched The Walker series, and as of 2026, he has already made 12 films while expanding into stage and exhibition projects. He actively advocates for “Art Museum as Cinema” and “The Author’s Intended Way of Viewing,” using minimalist methods to refine the nature of image expression. By emphasizing time and gaze, he has unfolded new viewing experiences, endeavoring to challenge the overly commercialized film industry.

SING Song-Yong is a professor and the director of the Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts. His recent curatorial projects include Footprints of the Walker: Tsai Ming-Liang, The Dawn of Video Art in Taiwan in the 1980s–1990s, and A One and A Two: Edward Yang Retrospective. He is the author of Projecting Tsai Ming-liang Towards Transart Cinema and Taiwanese Cineplasticity: Six Cross-Disciplinary Moving-Image Arts in Search of Cinema. He is also the co-editor of volumes such as Thinking with Tsai Ming-Liang: 13 Faces of Contemporary Chinese Cinema Studies and The Future of Time: Memos for 40 Years of Taiwan New Cinema.

Production Team

Artist, Curator TSAI Ming-liang

Curator SING Song-yong

Collaborative Artist LEE Kang-sheng, KAO Jun-honn, Anong HOUNGHEUANGSY

Production Manager Claude WANG

Production Coordinator Katrina HSIEH

Marketing Manager HOU Li-yu

Press Coordinator Maggie LAI

Exhibition Design LIU Chi-yi

Installation Team NIEH Tung, Anong HOUNGHEUANGSY

Technical Installation Coordinator TIEN Zong-yuan

Preparator LAI Shin-yu, CHAN Yu-hsuan, WANG Yu, TSAI Wen-chang, LEE Jay-en, HUANG Zhi-li

Audio-Visual Engineering LIAO Yi-hsiang, LIU Yao-yang

Graphic Design Winder CHEN

English/ Mandarin Translation Leonard CHIEN, Katrina HSIEH

Photography HSU Huai-che, CHEN You-wei, LIN Hung-lung, Claude WANG

Videographer & Editor WANG Yao-yi, Rebecca TSAI, HU Liwei, FAN Wen-shin