電影的當代境況變化急速，其物質媒介與展演形式不斷推陳出新。近年來，國內外各大現當代美術館紛紛投入動態影像藝術的展演乃及影片的委製與典藏，皆為意義深長也是非比尋常的跨界行動。蔡明亮的《臉》（2009）受羅浮宮邀約進駐拍攝，成為首部被收藏的影片。身為堅守藝術性與理想性的藝術家，蔡明亮這一部跨國創作尤其藉電影藝術與記憶、東西方文化典故及跨語際實踐等方略，形構電影如何以迥異其他藝術範型的影像形體，創造出一種既是影片生成為繪畫、也是繪畫幻化為影片的動靜遷徙。再者，在雜糅各種不同的記憶、文化及語言並對之進行重新組裝與配置之際，作為博物館－影片的《臉》不僅活化了現代電影與當代電影之間的歷史與美學遺贈，更開闢出一種以摻和與超越東西方影音文化構成的非純音像視域，作為建構電影記憶與嶄新生命的未來。換言之，《臉》超脫單一語系、族裔或文化共同體的華語影片概念，形塑了一座因結合跨文化圖像、跨媒介及跨藝術體制而湧現特殊性與造形性、異質性與生成性動能的跨影像之境。

The contemporary cinematic landscape is changing vigorously in terms of its material/media development and means of presentation. Recently several modern and contemporary museums started to hold moving image exhibitions and to commission artists to create moving artworks. This trend has intriguing border-crossing implications. For example: Tsai Ming-liang’s Visage (2009), sponsored by the Louvre Museum, is the first film registered on the inventory of art collections. Tsai approaches this transnational project from three perspectives: (1) cinema as a form of memory, (2) Eastern/Western allusions, and (3) translingual practice. Visage therefore distinguishes itself from other artistic forms and defines itself as a filmic figural: a varying form of constant migration, and a process of everlasting becoming made possible by the interplay between painting and cinema. By mixing and reconfiguring various memories, cultures and languages, this museum-film not only revitalizes the historical and aesthetic heritage within the modern-contemporary cinemas but invents an impure vision blending the Eastern/Western audiovisual and cultural conventions and capable of constructing the cinema’s past and future. It transcends the Chinese-Language film category, and creates a field of trans-imageness in which several “trans-” discourses converge—transcultural icon, trans-media and trans-artistic regime— and where several energies emerge—speciality, plasticity, heterogeneity, and generativity.