Lee Kang-sheng:
Relaxation and Tension

One of the most immediately striking features of the acting style of Lee Kang-sheng (born 1968) is how good he is at doing very little – almost nothing, in fact – for enormously long periods of screen time.

He must surely be among the calmest, most relaxed performers ever to appear in front of a camera. He can walk very slowly, lay very still, stare into the distance – and his entire body will be concentrated in the execution of this single act or gesture. It is no wonder that he became the supreme, physical embodiment of the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang, the incarnation in flesh of the director’s vision. Tsai’s minimalistic long takes require an actor with these very special, very particular skills.

Lee is able to be still, silent, focused but completely relaxed on screen. And perhaps also in life: look closely at the intimate discussion recorded between Lee and Tsai in Afternoon (2015), and you will notice that, although Tsai changes his mood and posture often as he sits, cries and talks volubly, Lee not only speaks very little, he barely changes the position of his body for 2 hours and 17 minutes!

Yet this extraordinary, almost unearthly calmness of the actor has another, reverse side. That other side is tension, agitation – which builds up and subsides like a wave of pressure from somewhere within his body. Relaxation and tension: these are the two, diametrically opposed states of Lee Kang-sheng’s being. Tsai’s films explore the passage between those states, and what causes the change from one to the other.

Let’s look at this metamorphosis in action. There is a shot near the end of Days (2020) when Lee is sleeping on a bed. Tsai cuts to a closer view of his face. Eventually, Lee opens his eyes; he has awoken. (Was the actor really asleep, or merely pretending? We may never know!) We can see, if we concentrate, that Lee, once awake, almost never blinks his eyes over several minutes. Except when external noise occasionally enters the directly recorded soundtrack, such as the loud and grating tone of passing cars. Whenever this sound occurs, it triggers a change in Lee’s face: he blinks several times rapidly, as if assaulted by the world.

This amazing shot works as the encapsulation of the entire film. Days is about a man who – and this is also true of Lee in reality, as we learn in Afternoon – suffers from neck pain. It is a subject that Tsai had already treated in The River (1997), in which Lee is a movie extra who, it seems, contracts a terrible disease after lying face-down in water for a filmmaker (Ann Hui). In that film, Lee spends almost his entire time on-screen in a state of agonised, muscular twitching. In Days, the pain is less theatrically evident, but just as constant: walking in a crowded city street, Lee wears a neck brace and holds a finger to his temple.

Such tension in Tsai’s cinema is a fact of existence, a fact of the body (which ages, gets weaker, becomes sick and eventually dies) – and also a fact of society. The urban world that surrounds his characters incites and ignites inner tension. That tension must somehow be released – often very graphically – before any degree of relaxation can return. This release occurs through physical means: massage, masturbation, sex, orgasm. These are the only ways to return the body to calmness or equilibrium. That, in a nutshell, is the narrative content of many of Tsai’s films.

Tsai first encountered Lee, working in an arcade, in 1991 and cast him in the tele-film Boys. Lee was then 23; today he is 55. He is still the central actor of every film, video stage presentation and art installation that Tsai makes – the director vows that he unable to work without this participation. 32 years so far (and no doubt more to come) form an astonishing period of time in which a director observes and records the physical and emotional evolution of a fellow human being. From one work to the next, we have watched Lee age; we have seen him in all his states.

Other filmmakers have done something similar: in the experimental field, Alain Cavalier in France has recorded those close to him over the course of decades; and American-born Stephen Dwoskin, resident in Europe for most of his career, fashioned collage-portraits of people who had shared his life. In the commercial realms of cinema, this phenomenon is rarer, more incidental than expressly pursued as a creative goal. Ingmar Bergman formed a loose troupe of actors that he would call upon to play very different roles from project to project; Richard Linklater has twice now set up a film which would capture the actors in their roles year after year.

The relation between Tsai and Lee, however, is quite unique. Because Lee is not entirely playing ‘himself’; and nor is he entirely inhabiting the skin of an illusionary, fictional character. On screen, he is always the projection of Tsai’s gaze, his concerns, his aesthetic. He is, to some extent, a creation of the artist – a mythic, Pygmalion and Galatea situation.

Are Tsai and Lee therefore in the tradition of Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich? No, because (as Tsai makes very clear in Afternoon), they have never been lovers, Lee is not gay, and their relationship is not romantic. It is a very close friendship (they share the same house, which they bought together in a mountain valley), perhaps with a touch of possessiveness on Tsai’s part.

Their age difference (Tsai is now 66) plays a part in their relation; the older man frequently states that he regards the actor as, in some sense, his ‘child’. By the same token, Tsai has shaped some of his projects in view of personal hardships in Lee’s life (as much as in his own), such as the death of a father. In Afternoon, Tsai states that he tells his students: “If you want to look at my work, look at Lee Kang-sheng”. Lee is the vessel for Tsai’s expression; but he is, by no means, an empty vessel.

Tsai’s relation to Lee is often compared with Jean-Pierre Léaud’s role in the filmography of François Truffaut. Tsai, as a fan of Truffaut, is very conscious of this connection; he speaks (as Truffaut did) of his star as an alter ego, and he placed a scene of Lee watching (and mimicking) a scene from The 400 Blows (1959) into What Time Is It There? (2001). In his role for Truffaut as Antoine Doinel between ’59 and ‘79, Léaud grew from a precocious young teenager into an insecure but charming adult. Beyond that time – and already in Truffaut’s non-Doinel project, Two English Girls (1971) – the matter of Léaud’s ageing, his physical and emotional frailty and the aura of mortality hanging over him, came to characterise his roles in the films of Olivier Assayas, Philippe Garrel and many others, including Tsai in What Time Is It There? (Léaud has a graveyard cameo) and Face (2009).

Since he had also worked with other Nouvelle Vague directors of the ‘60s (Godard particularly), Léaud has also come to increasingly figure as an emblem of the progressive cinema of his youthful days – and also, once more, of its endangered place in 21st century culture. Every Léaud film, today, is like a haunted house. And here we can see an important difference between Tsai/Lee and Truffaut/Léaud.

Lee has not become a living emblem of modern cinema, ‘slow cinema’, minimalist cinema, or even Tsai’s cinema. When he appears in other people’s films – rarely, by his own choice, and always depending on whether Tsai requires him for a project – it is never as an allusion to his lifelong work with Tsai. As an actor, it can be said that he doesn’t really exist outside of these films. It is in his own work as a director that we must carefully seek Lee’s individuality as an artist: The Missing (2003) and Help Me Eros (2007) are fine films that deserve our close attention.

But, to conclude, let’s return to Lee’s skill and his remarkable presence as an actor. Has he ever been described as Bressonian, in reference to the way that the French master Robert Bresson constrained his actors not to emote, but to simply be on screen? Bresson called his performers models, and Lee, in an imaginary universe, could be a perfect model in one of Bresson’s films.

Study how rarely Lee moves or manipulates the features of his face – unless it is for clearly exaggerated, comical effect, as in the fantasy musical numbers for The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005). Usually, Lee’s face is a pure tabula rasa. Even when experiencing joy or ecstasy on screen, he rarely cracks a smile. Everything in his acting is focused on bodily control, on using the whole of his body as the vehicle for a state or mood. He stays calm, until the dramatic moment when he must cry or sweat or moan – when he must release the accumulated tension of being in the world.

How many actors have truly reached such a pinnacle of pure presence?

© Adrian Martin 14 March 2024