Acclaimed Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang is renowned for creating some of the most nihilistic and erotic films of the 1990's. His films often use water in its multiple capacities—cleansing, raining, nourishing, flooding—to symbolize his character's emotions. Depicting the human body as a mysterious, malleable machine consuming and excreting on its own volition, bodily functions become metaphors for loneliness, desire, decay, and escape. His obsessive and isolated characters give his films a bleak outlook, but they also embody a wry sense of absurdist humor.