UW Taiwan Studies Program

In Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Nicholas de Villiers contends that we need to theorize both queer time and space to understand Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang's cinematic explorations of feeling melancholy, cruisy, and sleepy. Building on those arguments, this presentation starts with a reading of Tsai’s short film It’s a Dream (2007)—set in a movie theater in Malaysia—as a microcosm of Tsai’s themes and motifs of sleep/dreaming, cruising, nostalgia, and the space of the cinema. It then addresses Tsai’s “post-retirement” (after 2013) films and museum installations, including the queer Teddy award-winning digital feature film Days (Rizi, 2020) shot in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand, and the short film The Night (2021) shot in Hong Kong in 2019. Both were featured in the solo exhibition Tsai Ming-liang’s Days at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE) in 2023, experimenting with "expanded cinema" and collaborative curation of Tsai's still expanding body of work.

Nicholas de Villiers is Professor of English and film at the University of North Florida and 2023–2024 Fulbright U.S. Senior Scholar in Taiwan at National Central University at the Center for the Study of Sexualities. He is the author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (2012), Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary (2017), and Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang (2022), all from the University of Minnesota Press.