Beyond the cinematic: Reinventing Chinese martial arts through new media art practices

This article argues that the reinvention of Chinese martial arts through new media art practices reveals new aesthetic potentialities not readily available in the conventional cinematic medium. While martial arts cinema has captivated the global audience with visual and visceral excitements, most notably through the new-style wuxia films of the 1960s and the kung fu craze of the 1970s, it focuses on representational strategies characteristic of imaginative irreversibility and passive immersivity. The former refers to the rigid segregation of reality and fantasy that discourages the possibility of reversal, whereas the latter describes the immersive wuxia and kung fu spectacles as a disembodied experience, contrary to the core of martial arts learning and practice. To address the above issues, martial arts-inspired new media artworks, such as susuan pui san lok's RoCH Fans & Legends (2015) and Jeffery Shaw, Sarah Kenderdine and Hing Chao's Lingnan Hung Kuen Across the Century (2017), look for alternative approaches to represent martial arts imaginations for the goals of preserving an intangible cultural heritage and promoting an intellectual reflexivity. In so doing, not only do the new media artworks help to reposition Chinese martial arts as an everyday art form via conventional art spaces worldwide through the transnational and transregional flow of cinema, but they also establish the subtle connection between traditional martial art and contemporary art in the context of globalization.

Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Films: Police Procedural Colludes with Supernatural-Martial Arts Cinema

Through a close analysis of Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), this chapter argues that the film’s successful appeal to local and global Chinese audiences is based on a conservative reading of the familiar cultural trope of modernity versus tradition, as mirrored in the supposed tensions between the police procedural and the horror/supernatural elements in the wuxia shenguai genre. These tensions are problematic precisely because their narrative and rhetorical purpose is to shore up the deterministic logic of Chinese cultural history, the interpellative call of Chinese political power, and the cultural nationalist logic of being Chinese. However, the film is also capable to generating counter-readings of its politics by recasting itself as a global cinematic text of political irony and oppositional resistance.

Body Semiotics

This chapter considers how the (male) action bodies in martial arts cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, posed between mastery and vulnerability, served as a site/sight through which the aspirations and anxieties of Hong Kong people living in the flux of a rapidly modernizing society were articulated and made visible. Specifically, it identifies three types of action body—the narcissistic body, the sacrificial body, and the ascetic body—and discusses how each crystallized out of the changing social and ideological dynamics of Hong Kong during the period. As socially symbolic signs, these diverse but interrelated representations of the body are extremely rich in meanings, inscribing within themselves not only fantasies of nationalist pride and liberated labor but also the historical experience of violence, in the form of both colonization and unbridled growth, that lay beneath the transformation of Hong Kong into a modern industrial society.

Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity

The martial arts film, despite being long regarded as a vehicle of Chinese cultural nationalism, can also paradoxically be conceptualized as a mass cultural expression of Hong Kong’s colonial-capitalist modernity. Moving beyond generalized notions of martial arts cinema’s appeal, this book argues that the important and popular genre articulates the experiential qualities, the competing social subjectivities and gender discourses, as well as the heightened circulation of capital, people, goods, information, and technologies in Hong Kong of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to providing an original conceptual framework for the study of Hong Kong martial arts cinema and shedding light on the nexus between social change and cultural/aesthetic form, this book offers perceptive analyses of individual films—not just the canonical works of King Hu, Chang Cheh, and Bruce Lee, but many lesser-known ones by Lau Kar-leung and Chor Yuen, among others.