The Medial Turn

Abstract

This chapter traces the flow of soft-power resources across different artistic realms through Tsai Ming-liang’s intermedial practices in order to reflect upon the state and status of the cinematic image in the post-medial era. Tsai’s declared retirement, in 2013, from feature-length filmmaking frees him to develop other modes of artistic practice—what this chapter calls a medial turn, signaled by a move away from the movie theater and into art galleries and museums—that demands an expanded definition of cinema. This chapter argues that Tsai’s drift from the black box to the white cube reformulates the affective relationship between cinema and its audience. It will examine how Tsai, via a carnivalesque staging of his cinematic and intermedial work in his first solo exhibition held in Taipei in 2014, raises questions about the contemporary status of the museum as a cultural institution and a mass medium as public space. As Tsai’s medial turn coincides with his adoption of digital technology in filmmaking, this chapter also explores the ways in which Tsai’s digital turn affords an extension of temporal duration and slowness in a series of short films whose medial attention on the World Wide Web challenges the ethics of spectatorship. This chapter concludes that Tsai’s medial-cum-digital turn shows us that the power that cinema (conventional or expanded) has to move us, whether in the movie theater or in the museum, remains with images that slow us down and that demonstrates to us the softness and tactility of the human body.