Drifting through Time: Focus on Lee Kang-sheng

Street cast by fledgling director Tsai Ming-liang when he was working as a teenager at a Taipei arcade, the rivetingly taciturn Lee Kang-sheng would go on to become a constant throughline in Tsai’s filmography, appearing in every one of Tsai’s feature films—beginning with the little-screened 1989 telefilm Boys—and eventually, with 2003’s The Missing and 2007’s Help Me Eros, emerging as a distinctive and accomplished filmmaker in his own right. On the occasion of the US release of Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace, in which Lee gives a beautifully pared-down performance as a migrant construction worker living in Flushing, Queens, we look back at Lee’s 35-year career, including the films produced by his almost symbiotic collaboration with Tsai, his own directorial work, and more, in the first major retrospective of Lee’s work outside of Taiwan.

Sponsored by the Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York, special thanks to director Hui-chun Chang.