Abiding Nowhere (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2024)
Although Tsai “retired” from filmmaking in 2013, he’s found a new artistic outlet in the art gallery, creating slews of experimental films and gallery installations over the past decade. His biggest undertaking since then has been the Walker series, which feature his muse, Lee Kang Shang, as the robe-clad monk Xuanzang, walking at a painstakingly slow pace. While the early Walker films were primarily concerned with how Lee’s slow, meditative monk reconfigured bustling urban spaces (to emphasize this in Journey to the West, Tsai created mind-boggling mirror shots), the Walker films have become increasingly similar to Tsai’s narrative features. For example, in the excellent Tokyo-set No No Sleep, Lee and another man have an electric non-encounter as they silently sit beside each other in a hot tub, placing the series in direct conversation with Tsai’s features of urban anomie and tortured longing.
Recently, the most significant innovation in these films has been the addition of Anong Houngheuangsy, the co-lead of Tsai’s only narrative feature since 2013, Days. Houngheuangsy and Lee have a searingly intimate sexual encounter in that film, one that seems to temporarily relieve decades of physical and emotional pain for Lee. In the two Walker films since then, Houngheuangsy has appeared as a counterpoint for Xuanzang. As Tsai cuts between the two lonely characters, a trademark formal organization of his work since Vive L’amour, these most recent films imply a subliminal yearning for the catharsis of Days. In the Parisian-set Where, the two intersect twice, first inside the Centre Pompidou, where Lee walks over a large canvas that Anong is in the process of painting, and again in the streets of Paris, where Anong looks towards Lee, and we wonder if there’s a moment of recognition.
In Abiding Nowhere, this time set in Washington D.C., Lee and Anong’s narrative strands remain almost entirely separate. Although the American locale is one of the film’s major curiosities, Abiding Nowhere opens in the forest, with Anong crouching next to a river and Lee walking through a radiant grove. To my understanding, nature isn’t a new innovation in these films (one of the features I haven’t seen is titled Sand), but the timeless tranquility of these scenes feels significant, an encapsulation of this series’ mix of modern disaffection and meditative transcendence. When Lee finally arrives in the city, with its colonial brick buildings, it’s surprising that most bystanders seem to ignore him. A few of them take quick photos, but for the most part, everyone just goes about their day (a striking change from previous films, where pedestrians often try to heckle him). The most impressive shot in this regard takes place in Union Station, as travelers geometrically orbit Lee, a figure of plangent solitude in the center of the frame.
With more shots of Lee traversing empty urban spaces compared to other films in the series, I found connection in Abiding Nowhere with the origins of Lee’s character, Xuanzang. A protagonist from Journey to the West, one of the most famous ancient Chinese novels (and a ubiquitous children’s story), the legend goes that after walking from China to India in search of ancient scripture, Xuanzang achieved nirvana and became a buddha. As Lee walks alone in Abiding Nowhere, our focus is oftentimes solely focused on the deliberate, painstaking nature of his movement. We recognize Lee as an anachronism on a perpetual, demanding quest for enlightenment. Given the film’s inclusion of Anong, perhaps Xuanzang’s journey is a larger metaphor for Tsai’s directorial project, where Lee’s myriad incarnations search for human connection.
Many of the Walker films are commissioned by museums, and while I initially considered this as the practical outcome of Tsai’s stated commitment to the gallery space, Abiding Nowhere ties these institutions to the Xuanzang myth. Funded by the Smithsonian, Abiding Nowhere features extensive scenes within the National Museum of Asian Art, and if Xuanzang were to embark on a quest for scripture in the present day, he would surely need to visit countless museums. As Lee walks through the various exhibits, he’s simultaneously a visitor and an artwork. A vestige of another era, he becomes a part of the gallery as Tsai rhymes him with Buddhist artifacts, lighting Lee as if he were an ancient sculpture, and repeatedly placing him next to statues and paintings that visually echo the shape of his outstretched hands.
Tsai has repeatedly stated that these days, the setting of the art museum is where he finds the most meaningful engagement with his art, and in Abiding Nowhere, while Lee and Anong never appear in the same space at the same time, they interact through the the gallery. At one point, Tsai holds on a pensive shot of Anong patiently taking in a massive dragon painting, a painting that Tsai later compares to Lee, and perhaps this iteration of Where’s climactic shot-reverse-shot between Lee and Anong is a shot where Tsai racks focus from Anong, looking directly at the camera, to the artifact he’s looking at (the piece has a giant hole in the middle for Anong to stare through). Art as salvation has been a running theme through Tsai’s career, right from the moment we see Lee framed by a cutout of James Dean in Rebels of the Neon God, but perhaps reaching an apex in The Hole, where the music of Grace Chang, and the romantic fantasies that emerge from it, save the lives of Lee and Yang Kuei Mei. Here, Tsai uses sculpture and painting as opposed to music and film, but the general idea is the same. By attuning themselves to the wavelength of art, by looking and listening in a different way, Lee and Anong might find reprieve from the crushing isolation of modernity.
Abiding Nowhere played at The Beacon Cinema on June 16th