ABSTRACT
The chapter accounts for the missing as the leitmotifs in Tsai Ming Ling’s work in the meta-cinematic context, where the politics of memory turns into a fantasy and reappears in reality. Malaysian born director Tsai Ming-Liang stands out in Taiwan New Cinema as a unique auteur by sharing his own experience towards his Chinese identity. The Chinese cultural motif appears not as the authentic tradition, but as a blurred concept transported through popular cultures such as cinema, literature and music. The legacy of China, as much as the ancestral homeland is loaded with historical significance, is altered and reshaped through the perception of cinema. Sinophone Cinema, as a form of collective visual memory, plays a crucial role in the constitution of the mystified China by surfacing a fictional past, which in turn staged a world by its own. It renders the past in moving images and infiltrates it with imaginary content. Everything from the past becomes mythical; the Chinese-ness starts as the fictional, and the cinema is the place to be called home.
