City of Motion — Chengdu
Savouring tradition with Jacky Tsai and the MG Cyberster

18th May 2026
Chengdu, China

City of Motion is a series of city films following Jacky Tsai through places, encounters and everyday rituals, with the MG Cyberster as a companion on the journey. Each chapter approaches a city through a distinct feeling, bringing the artist’s personal perspective into a moving portrait of urban life.

In Chengdu, the starting point is the pleasure of savouring tradition. Tea houses, familiar street scenes and the warmth of a hotpot table shape a film about slowing down, looking closely and finding character in the everyday.

The film moves between the intimate scale of a tea cup and the changing architecture of the city. Bamboo chairs, conversation and the gestures of tea-house life sit alongside the Cyberster’s contemporary lines. Rather than treating tradition as a distant backdrop, the chapter finds it alive in the habits and rhythms of the present.

For Tsai, whose practice brings Chinese cultural references into dialogue with contemporary visual language, these shifts offer another way of looking. The journey connects observation with feeling: the energy of the street, the theatre of a meal, and the quieter atmosphere of Chengdu after dark.

Chengdu forms one chapter of an evolving series of personal city portraits. Alongside the Kuala Lumpur film, it opens a journey through different places and ways of living, connected by curiosity, movement and Tsai’s eye for the meeting of tradition and contemporary life.