This selective retrospective unites three rarely screened works by Tsai Ming-liang (b. 1957), one of the most celebrated artists working in contemporary Asian cinema. Tsai’s first two features, Rebels of the Neon God and Vive l’Amour, and the little seen recent work, The Wayward Cloud are all shaped by Tsai’s fascination with modern urban alienation and sexual frustration. They also share their magnetic lead actor, Lee Kang-sheng  who, much like Monica Vitti for Antonioni - the director to whom Tsai is frequently compared - acts as both emblem of the alienated city-dweller and as erotic figure, an object of ambiguous identification and desire. Tsai discovered the actor just as he turned from television to cinema, and Lee has acted as the filmmaker’s muse and creative partner ever since, with Tsai even attributing the slow, meditative rhythms of his films to Lee’s deliberate movements and ability to vividly embody a painful loneliness and listlessness melancholy.

While Rebels of the Neon God, Vive l’Amour and The Wayward Cloud often point, despairingly, to the ubiquity of alienation and the seeming inescapability of loneliness, they also possess a tender and comic side. For their depictions of lonely, drifting lives also carefully trace the ephemeral, unpredictable networks of abandoned and in-between spaces, those almost invisible trajectories and small rituals that somehow bind people together. The comic and deeply, achingly human side of Tsai’s always almost tragic vision gives it a lightness and grace that hovers somewhere between the delirious spatial confusions of Tati and the rich melancholia alternately explored by Buster Keaton and Chantal Akerman.