Taiwan & France / 2014 / 56mins / No dialogue

Journey to the West is Tsai’s sixth instalment of Walker series, a filmic durational performance project featuring Kang-sheng Lee as a monk walking very, very slowly in public spaces of Marseille. The quality of extreme slow walk is transcending. Lee executed his movement with controlled muscular pace, accentuating the sublime beauty of Tsai’s framings, stagings, movements, and architectural mise-en-scène aesthetically.

The monk character donning on red robes, reflects the long-lost preaching spirit, an homage to the monk-traveller Xuanzang in the Tang Dynasty, who embarked on a ten-thousand-mile overland pilgrimage to India. The rough rocky texture of Monkey Mountain in Marseille echoes with French actor Denis Lavant’s fascinating wrinkled face carved by the knife of age. When Lee walking on his face, roaming the ancient sun-dappled port city in the late summer, reminds of the Diamond Sutra:

All things contrived are like
Dream, illusion, bubble, shadow,
And as dewdrop or lightning
They should be regarded as such.