부산대학교 도서관

Tsai Ming-Liang's 'Walker' series is of iconic significance in the fields of cinema, theatre, and contemporary art. Many scholars focus on the political implications of Lee kang-Shang's slow-moving body and argue that not only could this corporality lead us to a more insightful awareness of the pace of our everyday life, but also that it has an aesthetic potential that can resist contemporary 'dromocracy' and the agression of speedy temporality. However, there are some theoretical gaps in the arguments for this 'aesthetics of slowness' (or cinema of slowness), and more detail and clarification are needed. If the political implication of slowness is often reduced to nostalgia for the order of the past, and the value of slowness is simply the opposite of speed in this aesthetics, then it is nothing more than an 'ethics of slowness.' In the face of the politics of acceleration and its increasingly dominant technologies of biopolitical governmental control, the aesthetics of slowness will not offer any significant criticism. This paper takes the 'Walker' series as a starting point, but shifts discussion to the context of video installation, body art and theatrical performance, while constructing a new version of the aesthetics of slowness by exploring examples of contemporary art that also engage with the concept of long duration. What is at stake here, however, is not a restatement of the outmoded and unrealistic Downshifting or Slow Movement in the 90s, nor a 'return to nature' which ignores the technological advances of our time. What we need here is a sort of art activism that can give rise to profound reflection on the transformation of everyday life and the passing of time. In short, what is needed is a 'politics of different speeds' in order to reclaim our sovereignty over time.