ABIDING NOWHERE / JOURNEY TO THE WEST

ABOUT THE FILMS:

ABIDING NOWHERE, 2024, Dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 79 Min, Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Taiwan/USA

The tenth film in Tsai Ming-liang’s acclaimed Walker series and commissioned by the National Museum of Asian Art in honor of its centennial, ABIDING NOWHERE was filmed in the museum and at other locations in the DMV. Inspired by the Tang-dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who famously walked from China to India in search of scriptures, the Walker series stars Lee Kang-sheng, who very slowly traverses landscapes and cities around the world. The first Walker video to be filmed in the United States, ABIDING NOWHERE also stars Anong Houngheuangsy in a film that Tsai describes as “two lonely souls on separate journeys, sometimes crossing paths but never once meeting.”

FORMAT: DCP

JOURNEY TO THE WEST, 2014, Dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 56 Min, Home Green Films, Taiwan/France

In 2012, Tsai Ming-liang began a series of short video works in which his longtime collaborator Lee Kang-sheng dresses in the robes of a Buddhist monk and wanders slowly, almost imperceptibly so, through the exterior and interior spaces of cities around the world. The videos were born out of Tsai’s “obsession” with Xuanzang, a seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk whose seventeen-year pilgrimage from China to India formed the basis for the sixteenth-century literary classic Journey to the West. Named after that work (and a sly reference to its setting in Marseille), this is the most ambitious of these videos so far. With his bright red robe contrasting with the subdued tones of the city, Lee moves with uncanny slowness through the bustling streets, this time accompanied by the equally eccentric French actor Denis Lavant.

FORMAT: DCP