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Choreographing the Sinophone body: martial movements and embodied languages in Hong Kong media

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Choreographing the Sinophone body: martial movements and embodied languages in Hong Kong media

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“Choreographing the Sinophone Body: Martial Movements and
Embodied Languages in Hong Kong Media”
Melissa Mei-Lin Chan
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Southern California
May 10, 2019
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
Committee Members: Professor Brian Bernards (chair), Professor Michael Berry (UCLA),
Professor Youngmin Choe, and Vice Dean Akira Mizuta Lippit

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Table of Contents

I. Introduction: Mapping Sinophone Bodies in Hong Kong………………………………………..3
II. An Obsession with (de)Constructing China: The Films of King Hu…………………………28
III. Sinophone Screaming: Examining Bruce Lee’s Visuality and Phonicity…………………58
IV. Dissonances: Multiple Voices and Obstruction of Bodies in Wong Kar Wai’s
Martial Arts Films…………………………………………………………………………………………………89
V. Remixing Chineseness: Censorship, Disembodiment, and the Voice in Hong
Kong Digital Media……………………………………………………………………………………………..138
VI. Coda: Sinophone Bodies, Political Anxieties, and Biopolitics………………………………162
VII. Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………165
VIII. Films Cited………………………………………………………………………………………………………..177

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I. Introduction: Mapping Sinophone Bodies in Hong Kong
Despite being born and raised in the United States, my childhood weekends were not filled with
Saturday morning cartoons playing on network television. Our videotape player was always
holding a Bruce Lee movie with Cantonese dubbing at the ready. We rented videos starring the
San Francisco-born Hong Kong raised star every week from our local video store in the San
Gabriel Valley. As time went on, Lee was switched out for the increasingly trendy Jackie Chan
and Sammo Hung also voiced in Cantonese. As a child, I thought Cantonese was the only
Chinese language that existed and that all Chinese people referred to themselves “people of
the Tang.” Little did I know that China and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were being
solidified as global and economic presences. Both the PRC and I were fully claiming to be
“Chinese,” but as time went on, the gap between my experience of Chinese culture and the
culture represented as Chinese culture grew farther apart. This widening gap is precisely the
focus of this dissertation. I interrogate what it means to be Chinese and to claim it as an identity
marker in spaces outside of the PRC, how “China” as a historicized concept as well as modern
nation-state is deployed in discourses of authenticity, and how media legacies influence
conceptualizations of “Chinese” culture.
The term “Chinese” has immense social, political, and economic power. Moreover, it has
come to signify numerous things ranging from a geopolitical space, national entity, ethnicity,
language, and culture among other things. Over time, these various notions of “China” and
“Chinese” have been collapsed into strictly defined categories that include certain individuals
and exclude others. Here, I turn to the Sinophone rather than solely focusing on “China.” The
Sinophone takes the flows of information, people, and objects as well as the networked
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imaginings of “Chinese” communities outside or even within China into account. Moreover, the
Sinophone decentralizes “China,” whether that is the PRC, a historical past dynasty, or modern
imagined community. Rather than seeing China as the center, the Sinophone emphasizes the
important existence of numerous peripheries that are subject to localization and also
contribute to the making of what we understand is “Chinese.”
I explore the networked intricacies of how “Chinese” is articulated in different forms of
visual media in Hong Kong and examine the political implications of Chineseness in Hong Kong.
Chineseness is an alternative to the word “Chinese” that still has resonances with “Chinese” but
emphasizes the process and differences that are manifest in the articulations of identity.
“Chinese” denotes a categorical way of being, and in our modern age, it cannot be detached
from the PRC. If it can be unhooked from the nation, the marker of “Chinese” as diaspora is also
inadequate for describing populations that do not see the geopolitical space of the PRC as a
homeland. Homelands shift and change with each generation, and the articulations of language
and by extension culture also transform. To account for these movements and processes of the
deconstruction of the term “Chinese,” Chineseness acts as a way to decenter China while still
addressing and problematizing the cultural capital such a term holds. In Sinophone studies,
language is central in the articulation of Chineseness, especially considering how “Chinese”
refers to a language among a plethora of other aspects related to identity and culture.
Language, therefore, in the Sinophone is essential an essential consideration. Already, the term
“Sinophone” with influence from Francophone studies emphasizes the phonic or the sounds of
the Sinosphere or what Gary Xu calls the Sinascape.
1
Central to sound is language and spoken

1
Gary G. Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
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articulation. Yet, this audibility of the Sinophone is but only one factor when examining the
ways in which language can be articulated.
In Sinophone communities, language is a sticky subject. Language as spoken and written
articulation are regulated in various ways. The presence of Han Chinese people who speak a
variety of different Chinese languages, such as Cantonese or Hokkien among others within the
People’s Republic of China since 1950 have been pushed into the margins due to the state’s
formation of official language policies where Mandarin is slated as the official language of the
PRC. The state is a determining factor in the policing of language. In spaces where there are no
official language policies, such as in different Chinatowns in the United States, the multiplicity
of Chinese languages prevents a dominant language from taking hold, especially as new
populations migrate into these spaces and local dynamics shift and change. This multilingualism
can bifurcate the formation of cohesive Sinophone communities, but it can also allow
individuals to coalesce according to their own affiliations.
Language, however, cannot be limited to spoken or written utterances. In fact, the body
articulates language in kinetic ways. In this introduction, I map out what it means to have a
Sinophone body in Hong Kong. The Sinophone body is one that speaks through movement and
kinetic connections when political tensions, contentious history, and censorship are present.
The body’s language appears in the form of movements that are both subtle flicks of the wrist
and not so subtle bursts of energy. In the visual form, the body expresses through the twitch of
a muscle, and more importantly, the body communicates through the regulation of movement
that makes it recognizable. This project explores the representation and regulation of the body
in the performance of martial arts as a form of language in the Sinophone sphere. The presence
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of regulated styles in relation to body movement also has the burden of origin myths and
historical baggage that comes along with the invocation of kinetic movement. Movement as
language, therefore, is at once about the visual, the aural, and the immersive properties of
viewing movement through the audio-visual medium of cinema.

Rewriting a Genealogy of Hong Kong Cinema:
Connecting History, Genre, and Digital Media
Hong Kong cinema has been studied at great length, and multiple volumes have focused
solely on creating a genealogy of Hong Kong Cinema that accounts for its colonial history,
multicultural society, and the influence of China and the PRC. Po Shek-Fu, David Desser, David
Bordwell, and other scholars have provided much research on the topic. Each volume as
contributed to Hong Kong film studies in a unique way. There has been a historical connection
between Hong Kong’s cinema industry and the early precursors in Shanghai where many
involved in the cinema industry in Shanghai moved to Hong Kong in the outbreak of World War
II and the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949).
2
In fact, such a connection further implicates Hong
Kong cinema as a trans-spatial phenomenon that is always already intersecting with other
cinema industries and producers. At the same time, Hong Kong cinema as accrued its own
standing as a separate cinema industry with its own media infrastructures and market share.
3

Prior to the rise of China and the massive investment and buying power from the PRC, Chinese
cinema and Hong Kong cinema were considered one and the same for non-Sinophone

2
Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Redwood City: Stanford University
Press, 2003), 6-8.
3
David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 3-11.
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audiences. For example, figures popularized in Hong Kong, such as Bruce Lee, were ostensibly
categorized as “Chinese,” with its ambiguous political and cultural baggage. The term “Chinese”
needs to be reevaluated in relation to Hong Kong Cinema, especially when considering Hong
Kong’s precarious position in relation to Chinese culture due to the British’s colonial influence
and the growing presence of the PRC.
Hong Kong cinema, particularly cinema in Cantonese and Mandarin coming out of the
former British colony, has also been conceptualized in relation to Chinese-language cinema and
as a transnational cinema. In his edited volume on transnational Chinese cinemas, Sheldon Lu
explores the historical contexts of Chinese cinemas. Beginning with shadow play yingxi and
transitioning to electric shadows dianying, which is the Mandarin term for cinema, Lu argues,
“such a historical poetics of visuality is inextricably linked to the politics of the modern nation-
state and deeply embedded in the economics of transnational capital.”
4
In other words,
Chinese cinema as we know it must be understood within its own cultural contexts, which are
always already inflected with transnational connections. Lu’s arguments about understanding
Chinese national cinema as itself already transnational is essential when attempting to
understand Chinese cinemas as such, but the question emerges: How can the context of Hong
Kong account for the national and must it be accounted for in a national cinema? The critique
of the transnational framework is that it maintains and upholds the national.
5
Lu rightfully
points out the politics of cinema and the national stakes in considering transnational cinema
movement, but the national and transnational then seem to be part of a feedback loop where

4
Sheldon Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1997), 2-3.
5
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 4-
8.
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these two concepts uphold each other without a critique of the centrality of the national when
considering various cinematic traditions.
Hong Kong has never had its own nationhood and will not have its own national status
for the foreseeable future. During the colonial era, its status as the emporium of the east made
this small peninsula and archipelago indispensable for the British and their trading companies.
The British attempted to renegotiate and extend the terms of their 100-year lease over the
islands in the early 1980s, but the PRC refused to renew the agreement. In 1984, the two
powers signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which would effectively handover Hong Kong
to the PRC in 1997. Hong Kong itself was not at the bargaining table and was merely a territory
that two other governments fought over. Essentially, Hong Kong was not allowed to negotiate
for its own national status. Hong Kong, therefore, does not have a national identity, and so
implicating it into a discourse of transnationalism is problematic. Its connection with
Chineseness in relation to the PRC and with “China” more broadly is an uneven one.
Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier, edited by Esther
Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-kam, delineates the shift from theaters to digital media in
Hong Kong cinema more broadly. The volume astutely intervenes in the arguments about Hong
Kong cinema by tracing Hong Kong’s local cinema movements and including the consideration
of the digital in cultural production. Beginning at the Hong Kong New Wave and ending at a
“digital frontier,” the essays in this volume highlight the diversity of media coming out of Hong
Kong during a period of transition, particularly from its status as a British colony to the
impending handover in 1997. By emphasizing the interface with a screen, the essays in the
volume exemplify the ways in which audience encounters change over time in Hong Kong and
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how this has intersected with communities and media makers active in the peripheries of
society who then create their own networks of media circulation.
What marks Hong Kong Screenscapes as a seminal book is its inclusion of the digital.
Conceptualized as a frontier, the digital in Hong Kong Screenscapes is considered alongside
other media, and this inclusion of the digital is a necessary intervention in thinking about Hong
Kong cinema and more broadly media. Highlighting the digital as “screen innovations,” the
authors include essays on experimental video, DV, and digital art made by those who are on the
edge of the mainstream.
6
They also highlight that these “Hong Kong independents” do not
simply concern themselves with the local issues of Hong Kong but they are ingrained in the
flows of information among other Sinophone sites, such as Taiwan.
7
The digital has itself also
taken on new terrain, particularly with the rise of social media and social networking platforms.
The digital is no longer the frontier where only experimentation happens, but the individual
screen—whether computer, tablet, or smartphone—has become the interface of choice for
many media consumers. Both experimentation and commercial mainstream media now
mobilize the digital to reach audiences. We, therefore, need to rethink how perception of the
digital is formed in relation to Hong Kong cinema when it is not the frontier but now considered
the norm. It is also important to note that Hong Kong Screenscapes connects the digital with
previous cinematic representations. The silver screen remains an important factor when looking
at a screen in the palm of a hand. In other words, it is necessary to reconsider how Hong Kong
cinema is cast when digital media enters the stage.

6
Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and See Kam Tan eds., Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the
Digital Frontier (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 2-3.
7
Cheung, Marchetti, and Tan, Hong Kong Screenscapes, 7.
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While Cheung, Marchetti, and Tan’s book focused on non-mainstream works, Hong
Kong media is not complete without exploration of martial arts cinema. My focus on martial
arts as a prime genre for an examination of the Sinophone and Hong Kong will be elaborated
later on in the introduction, but here, I focus on Hong Kong’s relationship specifically to the
martial arts genre. Some film criticism has categorized the martial arts genre as a sub-genre of
action cinema, or at least, action is seen as an equivalent genre with martial arts.
8
Action and
martial arts do feature kinetic movement and an emphasis on choreographed action. Yet, these
two genres diverge significantly when examining Hong Kong’s relationship with martial arts
cinema and Chineseness. Directors like Ang Lee have claimed that one must make a martial arts
film to be seen as a Chinese director when explaining why he made Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, which was his first foray into the martial arts genre.
9
Martial arts, therefore, holds a
specific position in relation to Hong Kong and Chineseness in that it is the glue that holds these
two things together. Martial arts as a genre has a connection to Chineseness instantiated by a
long history of martial arts literature and media that has emerged from Chinese film centers,
such as Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Hong Kong martial arts cinema is integrally attached to martial arts fiction, most notably
with the works of Jin Yong, the penname for Louis Cha.
10
Numerous works of cinema were
initially martial arts novels or serialized fiction in newspapers. For example, Jin Yong’s fiction,
such as The Book and the Sword, The Smiling Proud Wanderer, and the short story The Sword of

8
David Bordwell, “Aesthetics in Action: Kung Fu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity,” in At Full Speed: Hong Kong
Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther Yau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 73-94.
9
Christina Klein, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A Diasporic Reading,” Cinema Journal 4 (2004), 18-42.
10
Stephen Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015),
17-37.
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the Yue Maiden were all published in newspaper formats. Much of his fiction was serialized in
Ming Pao, a newspaper he co-founded. These works were adapted among others for the screen
numerous times, and the Shaw Brothers, one of the most prolific film studios in Hong Kong’s
history, did many adaptations of Jin Yong’s work. This is not to say that all martial arts films
from Hong Kong began as works of written fiction, but that Hong Kong’s engagement in both
the literary and filmic scene in the martial arts genre forges a unique connection between these
elements and has had a lasting legacy that is felt even today. Other scholars have also pointed
out the connection between Hong Kong and martial arts. Man-Fung Yip’s work on martial arts
aesthetics is a useful addition to this discussion.
Despite Hong Kong’s privileged position in relation to the martial arts genre for cinema
and literature, little has been done on the connection between Hong Kong, martial arts, and
digital media. As Hong Kong Screenscapes foreshadowed, the digital has allowed for a
proliferation of ways in which media is disseminated to the masses. Moreover, the digital to a
certain extent invites fan participation in the reimagining of media and media cultures. It is
essential to consider the digital interventions in Hong Kong as the digital has indelibly changed
the global mediascape. Indeed, as scholars like Nina Li have argued, the internet, and
particularly the Chinese internet, has a social history of spoofs and fan participation that spur
on vernacular forms and culturally situated practices.
11
As Marshall McLuhan argues, “The
medium is the message,”
12
and so it is necessary to examine how digital media changes or
maintains the reception of whatever that message may be. As scholars like Stephen Teo have

11
Luzhou Nina Li, “Rethinking the Chinese Internet: Social History, Cultural Forms, and Industrial Formation,”
Television & New Media 18, no. 5 (2017), 393–409.
12
Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 7.
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argued, the figure of Bruce Lee, King Hu, and others associated with Hong Kong martial arts on
a global stage hark back to a cultural nationalism where “China” is an imagined homeland.
13
Is
this message maintained by the digital medium in Hong Kong? How does this message
transform when Hong Kong media participates in digital articulations? Furthermore, how does
the digital effect the way in which we view a history of Hong Kong martial arts cinema?
To begin to explore these questions, this project undertakes a history of Hong Kong
cinema combined with an examination of Hong Kong digital media on social media and online
sharing platforms. By reexamining Hong Kong martial arts cinema from King Hu, one of the
most influential directors in the genre with his swordplay films, many of which are based on Jin
Yong’s works, as well as Bruce Lee’s breakout performances and global presence, this
dissertation evaluates the claims of cultural nationalism in a new light. In other words, the
Bruce Lee depicted on the screen in my childhood was not a representative of a nostalgia for a
homeland located in a distant China. Bruce Lee, rather, signified a Chineseness that was locally
constructed on the television screen. This compact history of martial arts cinema also intersects
with Hong Kong’s current cinema industry with its growing connection to the PRC’s media
industries and infrastructures. This connection is exemplified by the works of Wong Kar-wai, a
Hong Kong-based director who has made two martial arts films, one before the 1997 handover
and one after Hong Kong became an SAR, that address the shifting cinema industry in Hong
Kong. These films must be reevaluated in light of the rise of the digital, and Hong Kong’s most
emblematic genre must undergo a new film genealogy that includes the digital, shies away from

13
Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, 178.
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simple accounts of cultural nationalism and a longing for Chinese cultural roots, and exposes
the complexities of Chineseness.

The Building Blocks of Sinophone Bodies:
Hong Kong Media & Ambivalent Political Futures
Here, I turn to the study of Hong Kong culture more broadly and focus on its
intersections with the Sinophone. Arguments about Hong Kong have mainly emphasized its
cultural connections to an imagined “China” or have focused on its local uniqueness. These
polarized perspectives are imbued with their own politics and agendas. While the former
highlights the continuity of Chinese rule now harbored by the PRC, the latter contributes to the
pro-independence and pro-democracy movements in the former colony and stress a break with
the PRC. Both of these viewpoints have their own advantages and disadvantages in terms of
representation and visibility, but they only offer stark oppositions to each other. The nuanced
intersection between Hong Kong, localness, “China” as an imagined entity, and the PRC is lost in
this discourse when in fact Hong Kong is made up of contradictions wrapped in a paradox.
Such contradictions and nuance are relayed by Ackbar Abbas’ seminal work on Hong
Kong culture and politics. A dominant outlook on Hong Kong is that it is a place where politics
are sidelined in favor of capitalist expansion. The city is perceived as a place where economic
success of value and capitalism can flourish without any government restriction. The cost of this
unbridled image of a capitalist utopia is that politics are non-existent. Abbas argues that the
“phenomenon of doom and boom” or how the free market and economic spending has become
a replacement for political freedom and expression. This is not to say that politics in Hong Kong
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is actually not present, but images of Hong Kong have asserted this specific image of an
apolitical cityscape where its citizens are more concerned with their wallets and bank accounts
rather than their political freedoms.
14
In order to extricate Hong Kong from this apolitical
reading, Abbas proposes that in the anticipation of 1997, a critical turning point in Hong Kong's
history, the city experiences a culture of disappearance among other conditions in Hong Kong.
15

All of these terms encapsulate the complex situation in Hong Kong moving towards an
ambiguous future in 1997. Examining cultural production, such as literature and film, alongside
architecture, Abbas claims that Hong Kong as a space and community is trapped between the
post-1997 future as a SAR and past as a British colony without a present. In his discussion of
Paul Virilo’s notion of speed, Abbas points out Hong Kong’s precarious relationship with time
and space. Hong Kong is neither here nor there in a time that is constantly and irrevocably
moving forward, and this ambiguity gives way to feelings that the culture of Hong Kong will
disappear even though it has not yet disappeared.
Abbas’ arguments hinged on 1997 and the workup towards this monumental time in
Hong Kong. The handover ceremony has come and gone, and the conditions in Hong Kong have
changed significantly. Has Abbas’ prophecy come true? Has Hong Kong’s citizenry felt the
effects of a cultural disappearance, and has future nostalgia reigned as a supreme discourse in
Hong Kong’s cultural production? Yes, and no. Well after 1997, Hong Kong’s local cultural
industries have largely remained intact as far as infrastructure goes, but cooperation with the
mainland has become a norm and a necessity in Hong Kong's film industry. At the same time,

14
Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), 6-7.
15
Abbas, Hong Kong, 7.
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Hong Kong’s current status with relative freedom from PRC control remains a temporary one in
which Hong Kong is a testing ground for possible movement towards free speech. With an
impending future date in 2047 where Hong Kong’s status as a Special Administrative Region will
undergo a review and the PRC’s growing global power, Abbas’ arguments about future
nostalgia and a culture of disappearance do hold true to a certain degree. There are, however,
more complicated feelings on the ground in Hong Kong now that it is officially part of the PRC
but also still governmentally separate.
16

Alongside this sense of disappearance, there are now tangible effects in the SAR
brought about by the People’s Republic of China’s policies in and about Hong Kong. The PRC’s
attempts to exert control over Hong Kong are apparent from policies that have been
implemented, and Hong Kongers have responded with protests. For example, Article 23 of
Hong Kong Basic Law, which was added in 1988, stipulates that “The Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region shall prohibit by law any act designed to undermine national unity or
subvert the Central People’s Government.”
17
Put simply, Hong Kong’s own government will not
tolerate subversion of the PRC’s status and rule over the SAR. The implication of this law is that
Hong Kong SAR is politically aligned with the PRC. Reacting to this, Hong Kongers take to the
streets every July 1
st
, which marks the anniversary of the handover, drawing some of the largest

16
This comes with the caveat of not really separate in that Hong Kong is under the “One country, two systems”
policy, which I will expand on further along in the dissertation.
17
Ng Kang Chung, “Fear and loathing: which way forward for Article 23 national security law in face of stiff
opposition in Hong Kong?” South China Morning Post, November 22, 2017, accessed October 18, 2018.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2121035/fear-and-loathing-which-way-forward-article-
23-national
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crowds in 2003.
18
Aside from this, citizens have gathered in support of the Anti-Patriotic
Education Movement and the Umbrella Movement in the streets of Hong Kong.
19

What has changed drastically since Abbas’ publication is the PRC’s growing involvement
in Hong Kong’s politics and cultural production. While it was published in 1997, Abbas’ book is
more speculative about the future and describes the conditions working up to 1997. In a post-
1997 and pre-2047 time, Hong Kong’s mediascape has inextricable ties to the mainland because
of the PRC’s investment and buying power. Hong Kong influence as a cinema producer began to
wane in the 1990s, and in order to recover from this hit, the SAR has been increasingly involved
in co-productions with China. This move is not limited to Hong Kong, and other film industries,
like Hollywood, have also capitalized on working with PRC production and talent. Yet, what sets
Hong Kong apart from Hollywood is this sense of economic closeness and political distance
from the PRC.
Such proximity to and from the PRC is what sets Hong Kong apart from other places
involved with Chinese media making, and this proximal ambiguity is why Sinophone studies is a
relevant intervention into Hong Kong media. The concept of the Sinophone as productive
model of research was first introduced at length in Shu-mei Shih’s Visuality and Identity:
Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. Since then, there have been numerous responses
that attempt to tackle the concept and open up different modes of reading texts written in
Chinese or Sinitic script.
20
I assert that the Sinophone is a programmatic method of looking at

18
CNN, “Huge protest fills HK streets,” CNN, July 2, 2003, accessed October 10, 2018,
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/07/01/hk.protest/
19
I will discuss the contemporary events of Hong Kong in the final chapter of this project.
20
Gungwu Wang, “Chineseness: The Dilemmas of Place and Practice,” in Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and
the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the 20th Century, ed. Gary Hamilton (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1999), 118-134.
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texts that exceeds essentialist strategies of delineating the Sinophone as descriptive category.
In fact, the Sinophone sheds light on how other models of analysis lack a nuanced articulation
of how we as researchers look at different media in relation to Chineseness while
simultaneously dismantling its regime of authenticity as well as the localization process. In
Visuality and Identity, Shih reads Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and points to the
disruption of the Chinese universe through the articulation of spoken language and the
different accents the characters have while speaking Mandarin.
21
In other words, for Shih, the
Sinophone lies in the vocalization of language that breaks a sense of a flattened linguistic
universe. Thus, the –phone in Sinophone points to the vocalized speech highlighting the
potential of language in exposing the negotiation of Chineseness as such. The Sinophone,
therefore, prioritizes speech. For cinema in Shih’s analysis, the spoken word and language track
are of central importance.
While Shih’s book argues for the disruptive potential of the aural elements, particularly
that of speech and accents, the crux of Visuality and Identity also lies in the visual. This
dissertation differs in expanding the visual and constructing a visual lexicon that speaks to
Sinophone communities. In other words, building on Shih’s work on the Sinophone and
visuality, this dissertation sheds light on how a visual language is created through an
examination of Hong Kong martial arts cinema in relation to Sinophone studies. In Visuality and
Identity, Shih argues that the Sinophone is a point of departure from what Wang Gungwu calls a
“spectrum” of “Chineseness.” The term “Chineseness” is a useful one in that it imagines a

21
Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 2.
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flexibility when encountering notions of what constitutes a “Chinese” identity. Simultaneously,
the notion of a “spectrum” is flawed. Such a scaling of Chineseness implies that there are two
polarized ends: one of completely non-Chinese and one that is authentically Chinese. This
notion of an authentically Chinese identity is problematic in that it assumes something can be
essentially Chinese. This notion itself is a set of identity politics that can both empower but also
exclude and disenfranchise. After all, Chinese privilege in Sinophone spaces like Singapore is
reinforced by such notions of authenticity and ethno-cultural hierarchy.
22
Shih’s work argues
against such notions of a “spectrum” of Chineseness. Embracing Chineseness as a term, she
effectively claims that the process of localization and the highlighting of difference through
accented speech constitute a productive model of imagining a Chinese community.
Chineseness, therefore, is not placed on a spectrum but it is an articulation that focuses on
difference based in the local communities and immersive iterations of identity politics.
Shih’s work also discusses the issue of defining the Sinophone and visuality in the
Sinophone sphere. Shih argues against considering Sinophone as simply a linguistic group of the
Chinese diaspora.
23
Chineseness has a complex relationship with issues of ethnicity, culture,
and nationalism.
24
Chinese is not only understood as a language, but it is also seen as a
language, an ethnic group, a culture, and the citizens of the People’s Republic of China. Chinese

22
Adeline Koh, “Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore: A Conversation between Adeline Koh
and Sangeetha Thanapal,” Boundary2, March 15, 2015, accessed October 18, 2018,
https://www.boundary2.org/2015/03/chinese-privilege-gender-and-intersectionality-in-singapore-a-conversation-
between-adeline-koh-and-sangeetha-thanapal/.
23
This is also a problematic term in that it implies a notion of homeland, borders off communities, and ignores
possibility of cross-cultural contact. See Shu-mei Shih, “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural
Production” and Ien Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness: Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm” in
Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, eds. Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2013).
24
Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke
University Press Books, 2002), 4.
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and Sinophone as a linguistic denotation asserts a monolithic group of people with a shared
ethnicity, culture, language, and homeland. In other words, it conflates many different groups
of people and consolidates a certain understanding of a shared community. This understanding
of Chineseness and Sinophone in turn legitimates certain policies that attempt to erase
different communities that have been absorbed into China’s national narrative.
Therefore, I define the Sinophone, taking from Shih's definition, as a place-based
practice that organizes various communities as “a network of places of cultural production
outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of
heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several
centuries” to question the legitimacy of such a flattening narrative.
25
For Shih the Sinophone is
not a simplistic categorization as a specific closed-circuit group of people looking back at a
shared homeland or motherland. It is, instead, the process of meaning-making in places with
permeable boundaries due to colonization, globalization, minority cultures, and the
governmental imposition of geopolitical boundaries. The Sinophone approach is taking into
consideration the local intersection between the Han Chinese community, the local place's
communities, as well as an imagination of China and Chineseness which deconstructs each of
these terms to address ways such imaginations have been participating in the foreclosure of
possible circulations of ideas and discourses on Chineseness. Sinophone as methodology and
political tool is an opening up of intersectional possibilities between the local, migrant, settler,
colonizer, colonized, and center-periphery dynamics. Rather than static identifications, the
interaction between these groups is actually under perpetual negotiation. The Sinophone,

25
Shih, Visuality and Identity, 4.
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therefore, questions the politics of Chineseness as a conflation of language, linguistic group,
ethnicity, and nationality, and highlights how local cultures and interactions disrupt such a
narrative of cohesiveness.
The aural and phonic elements of Chinese as a language necessitates looking at the
graphic components as well. While based on a phonic notion, the Sinophone also includes the
system of signs in written language that utter a certain sound of a language. The formation of
characters has been documented in great detail by James J.Y. Liu in his discussion of poetry.
Chinese characters are constructed in a variety of ways, including pictograms, ideograms, and a
composite of pictograms and ideograms among other methods.
26
Chinese as a written language
system, therefore, already entails a graphic or visual element. Due to this graphic element, the
Sinophone also inherently includes a visual element. To further expand on this visual element,
some scholars have proposed the term "sinograph."
27
In Andrea Bachner's article in Global
Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, she explains that the sinograph illuminates the notion that
the Chinese language is actually also subject to change. It is permeable. Thus, the text on the
page does not simply serve as a representation of spoken language but becomes a site where
the counter-narratives emerge. Although her study focuses on written language and the
sinograph as representations of a spoken language, she highlights the visual aspect of text as a
medium. Text as a graphic or visual site cannot be simply reduced to a visual representation of
sonic difference. Moreover, this type of hierarchy creates a prioritizing of sound and speech
over text, which are both already themselves modes of representation.

26
James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 4-7.
27
Andrea Bachner, “Reinventing Chinese Writing: Zhang Guixing’s Sinographic Translations,” in Global Chinese
Literature: Critical Essays, eds. Jing Tsu and David Wang (Boston: Brill, 2010), 177-196.
Chan Page 21 of 178

The visual is a central part of Hong Kong’s negotiation of the Sinophone, and Hong Kong
media provides ways of representing visuality in the Sinophone sphere that go beyond the
visual aspects of written forms. In particular, the depiction of bodies is central to visuality with
respect to martial arts cinema. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is the lingua franca, but Hong Kong is
also a multilingual landscape. All of these languages exist simultaneously albeit in uneven ways,
which I will elaborate on in the final chapter of the dissertation. With this multilingual
soundscape, claiming that Hong Kong is unified by a particular spoken language is problematic
in that it disenfranchises speakers of different languages, erases the aural difference that makes
Hong Kong so special, and reinforces a hierarchy of spoken and written language that is itself
political. More importantly, in the shift of Hong Kong to a Special Administrative Region of the
PRC, censorship, and particularly self-censorship, is becoming a dominant mode of cultural
production in mainstream cinema with the rise of Hong Kong-China co-productions. It is amidst
these linguistic tensions that I proffer the “Sinophone body” as a subject and emphasize the
importance of martial arts cinema and media in Sinophone networks of circulation.
Here, I turn to the Sinophone body with its networked politics of representation. The
Sinophone body takes from Shih’s line of argument about the Sinophone as a concept and as a
critical methodology. The Sinophone body does not have official national ties but negotiates
between local politics and the presence of “China” in various iterations that range from spoken
and written language to ethno-cultural identities. Rather than reinforcing the presence of the
PRC or of an imagined Chinese community brought together by the politics of diaspora,
Sinophone bodies are ones that move and infiltrate notions of nationalism and cultural
essentialism, dismantling and deconstructing them through flexible affiliations and
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dissociations. Present in different Sinophone sites, these bodies communicate through their
movement in both regulated and unregulated ways whether that is through regional styles of
martial arts or through the thrashing about of monstrous limbs. The body becomes a form of
language in sites where linguistic communication falls apart or is censored, and the body is
active, always moving away and towards localized iterations of Chineseness rather than
imagining an authentic experience of Chinese culture that is elusive. The Sinophone body elides
censorship and linguistic compromise in order to speak against or tangentially to hierarchies of
power manifest in the PRC and beyond.
With its attachments to Chineseness, the Sinophone body can move in a variety of ways.
For example, in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together, the focus on two gay men Lai and Ho, played
by Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Leslie Cheung respectively, and their move from Hong Kong to
Argentina. Both Leung and Cheung have made appearances in Wong’s films, and Cheung in
particular due to is queer popstar persona has been read as a resistance to normalized
expectations of identity and culture.
28
The fact that Cheung plays a gay man in Happy Together
further highlights the films importance in relation to Wong’s oeuvre and the construction of
Hong Kong’s identity and culture featured in this gay relationship. Their turbulent relationship is
featured throughout the film, and their bodies move through various types of spaces that
include national borders depicted by the stamping of their passports at the beginning of the
film and domestic spaces, such as the kitchen of their hostel where they dance together in a
melancholic fashion. Their bodies and the way in which they move and perform their sexualities

28
Gary Bettinson, “Reflections on a Screen Narcissist: Leslie Cheung’s Star Persona in the Films of Wong Kar-wai,”
Asian Cinema 16, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 220-238.
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is a central focus of the film, and the bodies featured problematizes a moment of possible
nationalism as it was released in 1997, a time where the PRC took over Hong Kong as the
sovereign state.
29
The Sinophone body undermines the national.
Happy Together is a body film tangled up with sexuality in an almost homosocial world,
and in this way, it resonates with martial arts films in its emphasis on the body. Martial arts
films use the body to fight, make contact, create physical connections, and exchange meaning.
Studies of Hong Kong martial arts cinema have highlighted the ways in which Hong Kong is
folded into the narrative of “Chinese martial arts cinema.”
30
This discourse, however, takes the
notion of “Chinese” for granted in the history of martial arts cinema and only considers Hong
Kong as part of the evolution of “Chinese martial arts cinema.” In other words, the larger
narrative streamlines the various Sinophone martial arts cinemas into a singular nationalized
genre. The body in this case becomes a national Chinese body. This type of body, however,
ignores the complicated history of Hong Kong with China and the PRC. The Sinophone body,
therefore, is my alternative to this discourse.
The Sinophone body moves in a performative way according to an expectation and a
shared visual lexicon. Performativity is one aspect of the Sinophone body that limits this body.
Rather than a body that is unregulated, this body is the subject of various regimes of power.
31

For example, the kinetically moving body is not simply the random explosion of fighting melees

29
For an examination of bodily performance, dance, and choreography in China in relation to ideology, see Emily
Wilcox, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2018).
30
Jia Lei Lei 賈磊磊, “Gangdao Xia Feng” 港島俠風 [Hong Kong Chivalry], in Zhongguo wuxia dianying shi 中國武
俠電影史 [A History of Chinese Martial Arts Cinema] (Beijing: Beijing wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2005), 68-70.
31
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 175-193.
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in Bruce Lee’s films. There is a performance of a Chinese identity by Lee’s moving body that
audiences recognize as such. A conceptualization of “Chinese” is ingrained in the movement of
the body, but “Chinese” is not static for Lee either. In a way, his movement refuses static
definitions and performances of identity through his transnational and Sinophone persona.
These regimes include but are not limited to the historical conceptualizations of the body in
relation to the politics of space in relation to King Hu’s films, the prevalence of death and
biopolitics in relation to fighting bodies in Lee’s cinematic representation, and the intervention
of posthuman discourse and technological modification of the body in the works of YouTube
content creators. It is through this performance according to specific guidelines and shared
understandings that bodily communication is understood, but it can also carve out its own
space to diverge and converge with other discourses of Chineseness. In short, the Sinophone
body has a twofold presence. It is a body that is present and represented in the Sinophone
world and in various Sinophone cinemas, but it is also a body that moves in specific ways,
navigating local concerns alongside an expression of Chineseness that always already considers
the presence of a politicized “China.”
Media from Hong Kong utilizes alternative forms of language practices to address
specific anxieties surrounding the position of Hong Kong in relation to notions of Chineseness
and Hong Kong identities. By examining Hong Kong cinema and digital media, this dissertation
tackles the charged issues of language hierarchies, media history and legacy, and body politics.
The first two chapters address cultural nationalism in the Sinophone context with the films of
King Hu and Bruce Lee. King Hu’s films construct a recognizable repository of images that signify
a shared history, and his films present numerous martial arts archetypes in the visual form,
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such as the female knight errant. In my analysis of King Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966),
Dragon Inn (1967), and A Touch of Zen (1971), I explore a language of Chineseness informed by
the affective body movements on screen that refracts and problematizes a monolithic Han
Chinese identity rooted in dynastic cohesion and lineage. Although the repository of images
seems to construct a flattened world of the Ming dynasty, the movements on the screen
expresses the constructedness of such a world. Cultural nationalism in relation to King Hu is one
that is perceived as a dynastic nostalgia, but cultural nationalism as a framework does not
account for how the film moves through time and through transnational communities. The
films of King Hu, rather, create a dynamic self-referential history that puts itself together as
much as it takes itself apart by pointing to its own construction. In other words, the films of
King Hu both construct and deconstruct an image of a shared Chinese past for those in
Sinophone communities where his films circulated.
In the second chapter, I focus on Bruce Lee and illustrate how the visceral scream that
Lee releases in his practice of martial arts works in tandem with the movement itself. Lee’s
unregulated body movements, his style of “no style,” and the scream pushes the boundaries of
spoken articulation in the Sinophone world. Cultural nationalism in relation to Lee’s films
expresses a sense of anti-imperialism that is connected to the national struggles against
colonialism. While Lee became a figure for various anti-imperialist movements, cultural
nationalism in this case continues to singularize cultural practices. Moreover, the emphasis on
“cultural” in this case is problematic in that the cultural homeland of China and the People’s
Republic of China for Lee is inaccessible. An alternative to the cultural nationalist framework is
to consider Lee in tandem to the Sinophone. In this chapter, I closely examine the phonicity of
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Lee’s image and highlight the scream that he emits in the process of martial arts movement as
an expression that resists a monolingual soundscape.
The second half of the dissertation examines the shift in the politics of filmmaking in
Hong Kong in the post-1997 Handover conditions. The third chapter evaluates the cinema
aesthetics of Wong Kar-wai’s martial arts films, Ashes of Time (1994, 2008) and The
Grandmaster (2013). I argue that Wong’s films exemplify a move towards PRC audiences in the
filmmaking process and considerations of how Chineseness is established that also continues to
voice resistance against a monolithic Chineseness through the depictions of various regional
martial arts styles and the obstruction of bodies. By looking at Ashes of Time, which came
before the 1997 Handover, and The Grandmaster, which came after 1997, Wong’s two martial
arts films shed light on how the PRC has become a growing consideration for Hong Kong
filmmakers.
“Remixing Chineseness: Censorship, Disembodiment, and the Voice in Hong Kong Digital
Media,” is the last section of the dissertation and addresses the notion of censorship, digital
media on social networking platforms, and how Chineseness is reformulated through remix and
visual rhetoric. King Hu, Bruce Lee, and Wong Kar-wai’s films have provided the foundation for
the emergence of online digital media that participate in the construction of Chineseness
outside of the PRC’s purview through the mobilization of martial arts tropes and manipulations
of the body. I analyze digital media from YouTube in Hong Kong in the final chapter and explore
the formation of a visual rhetoric of Chineseness through the process of remixing familiar
tropes and images, such as Guan Yu, a martial deity, and Lei Feng, a People’s Liberation Army
soldier.
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In sum, “Choreographing the Sinophone Body: Martial Movements and Embodied
Languages in Hong Kong Media,” explores the role martial arts media and its depiction of
bodies in motion play in the formation of Chineseness in Hong Kong from the 1960s to the
contemporary period. Previous studies of Hong Kong cinema, and particularly martial arts films,
have argued that Hong Kong martial arts cinema and seminal figures, like King Hu and Bruce
Lee, reflect Hong Kong’s sense of “cultural nationalism” that hark back to an imagined Chinese
homeland. Considering the complexities in Hong Kong’s history with British colonialism and its
current status as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
it is necessary to reconsider such claims when Hong Kong identity politics and its voice for
representing what is or is not “Chinese” is at stake. Moreover, with the tightening of cultural
control by the PRC in Hong Kong, martial arts media in the SAR is not limited to cinematic
articulations but have also appeared online. With the emergence of online media that express
Hong Kong’s ambivalence towards the PRC, it is necessary to reexamine a genealogy of Hong
Kong cinema, analyze the localized iterations of Chineseness throughout Hong Kong’s cinema
history, and trace Hong Kong’s influence over how “Chinese” is defined.

Chan Page 28 of 178

II. An Obsession with (de)Constructing China: The Films of King Hu
King Hu (1932-1997) has been one of the most influential martial arts film directors of the
twentieth century. With films such as Come Drink with Me and Dragon Gate Inn, King Hu rose
to fame within Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Although his third film, A Touch of Zen,
did not translate into box office earnings, the film garnered Hu international renown at the
1975 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Technical Grand Prize and was nominated for the
Palme d'Or.
Aside from this festival fame, King Hu has also been a central figure for the study of
Chinese and Sinophone cinema, especially when considering his lasting influence over the next
generation of directors. For example, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon pays homage
to the prototype or archetype of the female xia or knight-errant most notably developed by
King Hu. Although some scholars, such as David Bordwell profess their love of Hu’s martial arts
films and acknowledge Hu’s mastery in the genre.
32
Hu's influence in undeniable, and thus, it is
still important to consider Hu's significance.
Much of the scholarship takes an auteur approach to Hu's films, particularly with
respect to the female knight-errant archetype.
33
Another approach is to examine the aesthetics
of his films in relation to the use of traditional Chinese aesthetics.
34
These are, indeed,
significant contributions Hu has made to martial arts filmmaking. Here, I explore how the
martial arts films of King Hu, such as A Touch of Zen (1971), do not simply assert cultural

32
David Bordwell, "Richness Through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse," in The Cinema of Hong Kong:
History, Arts, Identity, eds. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 113-136.
33
Stephen Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009),
130-140.
34
Héctor Rodríguez, “Questions of Chinese Aesthetics: Film Form and Narrative Space in the Cinema of King Hu,”
Cinema Journal 38, no. 1 (1998): 73–97.
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nationalist sentiments but reimagine a dynastic China that provokes resistance to the state and
a monolithic image of Chinese culture. Continuing the discussion of King Hu's sense of history
and culture as posited by martial arts film scholars, I focus on the re-workings of Chinese
cultural identities within Hu's films themselves. In the previous section, I questioned the notion
of an ahistorical Chinese identity that some scholars have claimed that Hu had lost and
attempted to recover within his films. I argue that this identity was never stable in the first
place and therefore cannot be lost or recovered. In the following section, I further explain the
deconstructing of a singular Chinese identity through Hu's reimagination of history, ethnicity,
and alliances in his first three directorial films, Come Drink with Me, Dragon Gate Inn, and A
Touch of Zen by means of fashioning the body as a form of language that forms a network of
visuality. By fashioning the body’s modes of visuality, which include his characters’ clothing and
new ways to choreograph movement sequences due to the introduction of new cinematic
technologies, King Hu’s films deconstruct the notion of a shared history of Chinese people. In
other words, the different bodies depicted and choreographic sequences in King Hu’s films
offers an alternative historiography that form a rupture in what is considered the historical
basis of a singularized Chinese identity.

Framing King Hu and His Films: Rethinking Cultural Nationalism and Traditional Aesthetics
Following prior work on King Hu's films, discussing Hu's complex identity and migration
is unavoidable. King Hu was born in Beijing in 1932. Due to the turbulent happenings in China
from the 1940s to the late 1970s, such as the Chinese Civil War and the establishing of the
People's Republic of China, he was forced to relocate to Hong Kong. Under the massive
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conglomerate of the Shaw Brothers, formerly known as Unique (tianyi) Studios in Shanghai, Hu
began to rise as a filmmaker associated with the ancient costume dramas and martial arts films.
Later, he would migrate to Taiwan and make his internationally renowned work, A Touch of
Zen, under Union Film Studio. The distribution outside of Taiwan for the film remained under
the Shaw Brothers.
The three films I am exploring in this chapter share a set of similarities. Aside from their
generic qualities of the swordplay film, these films feature several female heroines. King Hu’s
directorial debut sets the precedence for many martial arts films that came after, such as Ang
Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with its female knight errant, and Zhang Yimou's House
of Flying Daggers (2004) with its verdant bamboo forests. Come Drink with Me features Golden
Swallow played by Chang Pei-pei, who tries to rescue her brother from a gang of bandits that is
occupying a Buddhist monastery led by an evil abbot. Fan Da-pei (Yueh Hua), a local beggar and
drunkard, comes to Golden Swallow’s aid while she faces off with the bandits. In the final
scene, Fan faces off with the evil abbot and Golden Swallow leads a group of female warriors to
fight off the bandits.
King Hu’s second directorial film, Dragon Gate Inn, also known as Dragon Inn, has been
remade multiple times. New Dragon Gate Inn was released in 1992, and The Flying Swords of
Dragon Gate was released in 2011. It was also an inspiration and citation for Tsai Ming-liang’s
Good-bye Dragon Inn (2003). This film also marked King Hu’s move to Taiwan and his departure
from the Shaw Brothers’ Studio. These remakes attest to the relevancy and popularity of King
Hu’s films on the martial arts swordplay films. Dragon Gate Inn features dynastic politics as the
center of the plot. Eunuch Tsao has politically bested General Yu. The general is beheaded, and
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the eunuch orders the murder of Yu’s family. The family, now in exile, is ambushed by the
eunuch’s secret police, but unbeknownst to the eunuch, the innkeeper, Wu Ning, was a
lieutenant to the general. With the help of a brother-sister martial arts duo, Wu Ning and two
other eunuchs aim to protect the family and help them get to safety.
A Touch of Zen is King Hu’s longest film in both duration and production. The film began
production in 1968 in Taiwan, and it was not completed until 1971. The release and circulation
of the film was also very complex. The original version released in Taiwan consisted of two
parts. The first part was released in 1970 while the filming continued. The second part, released
in 1971, picks up exactly where the first part ended, making it seem like the first and second
part were a seamless film. Further pushing these two separately released parts into one, the
Hong Kong release was a combination of the first two parts with a brief intermission. The Hong
Kong release, which became the international release, consolidated the films into one without
cutting down on the runtime. The film is 187 minutes long.
The plot of A Touch of Zen centers around an unremarkable scholar named Gu, played
by Shih Chun. In his spare time, Gu paints portraits for customers and wanders around his town
much to his mother’s chagrin. She urges him to take the imperial exams and find a befitting
wife to guarantee the survival of the family lineage. Gu encounters Yang Hui-zhen (Hsu Feng) in
an abandoned courtyard where he initially mistakes her for a ghost. They befriend each other,
but Yang is a fugitive being chased by the Eastern Depot and their soldier eunuchs. To save
Yang, Gu hatches a plan along with Yang’s other friends, who all are also skilled warriors, to trap
the Eastern Depot eunuchs in the abandoned courtyard and make them believe that ghosts are
the ones attacking them. After the battle, Yang retreats to Abbot Hui’s (Roy Chiao) monastery
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where she has Gu’s child. Despite Gu’s appeal to Yang, she refuses to leave the monastery and
becomes a nun. She gives Gu his child, but Gu and the baby are tracked down by the
commander of the eunuch soldiers. Yang and Abbot Hui successfully protect Gu and the child
and kill the commander. In the battle, both Yang and Abbot Hui, however, are gravely injured.
Abbot Hui bleeds golden blood, and Yang is seen walking towards him while he meditates and
achieves enlightenment.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he continued to direct similar swordplay films, such as
Raining in the Mountain (1979) and Legend of the Mountain (1979). Both latter films were
made in South Korea. In the 1990s, Hu made two films to lackluster acclaim, The Swordsman
(1990) and Painted Skin (1993).
King Hu’s traversing of international boundaries points to how historical events put into
motion geographical and cultural tensions between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
35
Active
mainly in such contested sites, he directed most his films in Hong Kong, but he also worked in
Taiwan and South Korea, which highlights his transnational and Sinophone connections. His
films regardless of their location of production were essential in constructing specific
archetypes in the Hong Kong martial arts genre. Hector Rodriguez claims that Hu's migration to
these various places made him seek out specific art forms to reconfigure and recover his
Chinese identity.
36
Rodriguez's argument, however, overlooks the actual physical traversing
that Hu takes in that he simply sees Hong Kong and Taiwan as that which is outside of China

35
For a detailed account of his global and Sinophone impact, see Hu Weiyao 胡維堯 and P.K. Leung 梁秉鈞, Hu
Jinquan dianying chuanqi 胡金銓電影傳奇 [The Legend of King Hu’s Films] (Hong Kong: Mingbao chubanshe,
2008).
36
Rodriguez, “Questions of Chinese Aesthetics,” 75.
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and therefore not China. Yet, these two spaces and the formation of identity around these
spaces is complex and always already relational. Hu's migration is not simply setting up the
binary of China and not China, but it reveals the physical as well as cultural reconfigurations of
the various places involved.
King Hu has been a professed admirer of Beijing opera and traditional forms of Chinese
painting and art, and so it is not surprising that much of studies around his films have also
revolved around his use of these art forms within his films. Furthermore, much of the
scholarship around King Hu's films have been analyzed in terms of Hu's expression of his
mastery over Chinese art forms, and thus Chinese culture, to recover a sense of authentic
Chinese identity. It is impossible, however, to extrapolate King Hu’s migration from the images
and representations of Chineseness expressed in his films.
Stephen Teo provides a detailed analysis of the history of martial arts films and their
styles. He explains that during the advent of martial arts cinema, the umbrella term that also
encompasses the kung fu films of Bruce Lee, the films utilized the form of the guzhuang pian,
also known as the costume drama.
37
The implication of the use of this mode of representation
is that it always already invokes a sense of history, though the history may be completely or
partially fictional in that it represents and utilizes tropes situated in past adopted mainly from
wuxia fiction. In this sense, Teo's articulation of martial arts films is particularly useful in
analyzing the films of King Hu. The time represented in Hu's films not only evokes a sense of
history using the guzhuang pian mode, but his films explicitly address a historical past during
the Song and Ming dynasties.

37
Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, 24-30.
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The choice to depict these dynasties is also noteworthy. The dynastic past has been the
historical background of choice for a variety of different films in Hong Kong among other places.
Even in our contemporary period, the Qin (221–206 BC) and Tang (618-907) dynasties are
popular choices for the setting and backdrop in films from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
38

This trend dates to one of the earliest Chinese films as well.
39
Using imperial periods, therefore,
is not something new or unique, but it remains significant because of its persistent presence in
his films.
This presence, however, does not collapse these distinct dynastic periods into one
ambiguous past. Each period is chosen due to their particularities. For example, films or
recreations of the Tang dynasty focus on its cosmopolitanism.
40
The Ming is also a period
because it straddles two “foreign” dynasties and identifies as a reestablishment of Han Chinese
rule.
41
Prior to the Ming, the Mongolian Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) held the position of the
hegemon, and directly after the Ming, the Qing (1644-1912) Manchurians took over the
emperor’s seat. With the fall of the Qing in 1912 and the rise of the Republic of China and a

38
One of the most popular PRC films set in China’s imperial past is Hero (2002), directed by Zhang Yimou that was
set in the Warring States period before “unification” under the Qin dynasty. Hero was a wildly popular commercial
film that circulated mainly within mainland China and globally exported for mainstream circulation. A recent art
house film, The Assassin (2015, dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien) also reached global success. Hou’s co-produced film between
the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan took a tale from and set in the Tang dynasty. The number of films set in a dynastic
period from Sinophone regions is quite endless.
39
One of the first Chinese films to date is The Battle of Dingjunshan set during the Three Kingdoms Period (169-280
AD). See Jubin Hu, Projecting A Nation: Chinese National Cinema Before 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2003).
40
See Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2000).
41
Bamber Gascoigne, The Dynasties of China: A History (London: Folio Society), 153-178.
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period of warlords ravaging the newly founded nation, the Ming dynasty was the last of the
imperial Han Chinese rule.
42

Han Chinese rule is an integral focus point for a shared history. The Ming differentiates
itself by being sandwiched between two non-Han Chinese dynasties. The emphasis on a Han
Chinese dynasty is tied to a Chinese ethnocultural nationalism. While this concept was mainly
deployed to describe events in mainland China during the turbulent modern period from 1911-
1949, ethnocultural nationalism is also the discourse cited when referring to a Chinese
diaspora.
43
It describes the attempt to collapse ethnicity as a social construct, culture, and a
geopolitical nation. Moreover, it recapitulates the idea that the Han Chinese are part of a
shared bloodline and are part of a consanguineous family. The emphasis on Han Chinese rule
illustrates how King Hu’s films draw on this ethnocultural nationalism to mobilize a shared
identity.
Teo explains that although Chinese filmmakers outside of China proper are not longing
for the geographically bound entity of mainland China, this does not mean that these
filmmakers are completely devoid of all feelings of a Chinese nationalism. Instead, the
nationalism that is formed revolves around the notion of a "motherland" and shared history
that is somewhere in the distant past, making Teo's construction a form of nostalgia. Yet, this
nostalgia cannot be pinpointed to an individual's experience and is a nostalgia for the imagined
community unified through a cultural Chineseness rather than a geopolitical Chinese identity.

42
Han Chinese remains the hegemonic authority today with power both culturally and in the state. This has led to
numerous protests in non-Han populated regions of China, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, because of the oppressive
force of Han Chinese social, economic, and political structures in those regions. See also Ray Huang, 1587, A Year
of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
43
Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke
University Press Books, 2002), 53-82.
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In his book on Hong Kong cinema, Teo elaborates on this term in terms of Bruce Lee and
his films. He argues that overseas Chinese “wish to affirm themselves and fulfil (sic) their
cultural aspirations by identifying with the 'mother culture,' producing a rather abstract and
apolitical type of nationalism."
44
While this is an important concept in that Teo recognizes a
complex relationship between China, Chinese culture, and the huaqiao or overseas Chinese
identity, Teo does not situate the concept within a historical trajectory. In other words, cultural
nationalism points to an ahistorical notion of Chinese culture and identity. Moreover, Teo
attempts to apply this notion to not only Bruce Lee but also to King Hu and other martial arts
films. Although some films may indeed address and enforce the notion of a cultural
nationalism, to apply it to these films is problematic since these films are different in their
articulations of martial arts and historical circumstances.
Alongside this application of cultural nationalism, Teo claims that these films in their
representations of history also imply a sense of nostalgia. It is a nostalgia for that which has
never been experienced. This is because the historical period represented in the film was not
actually experienced by the audience, especially in terms of the Song and Ming dynasties. Teo's
works mainly leave the notion of nationalism untouched and unexplained. Leaving nationalism
unexplained, however, especially in the case of China, Hong Kong, and Chinese culture can be a
problematic assumption in that these concepts are flattened, and any significations of
individuality are lost. It is therefore necessary to look at first the idea of nationalism; second,
the idea of a national allegory; and third, the constellation of fragmented meanings in the
representations of history and identity in Hu's first three martial arts films. Briefly, nationalism

44
Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 111.
Chan Page 37 of 178

can refer to a variety of things. What makes nationalism different from other modes of
identification is that there is a push for political sovereignty. Summarizing Frantz Fanon,
nationalism is the struggle against the colonizers, the elite, and the hegemony that aims for a
political sovereignty.
45

Cultural nationalism is a useful concept for describing the complexities and pointing out
the tensions that exist between terms like diaspora, homeland, and nostalgia in the Sinophone
context.
46
Teo’s conceptualization of cultural nationalism for King Hu and Bruce Lee is mainly
concerned with how grand narratives are written and deployed. What it leaves untouched,
however, is how individual presentations of history and their own relationships to the
imagination of China relate to articulations of Chineseness. Teo’s reading of those texts is
iconographic and focuses on how representation works in relation to the construction of a
Chinese identity. The problem of representation is that it is always already symbolic and
semiotic. The image and language in a cultural nationalist reading are intrinsically part of a
systematic ideological apparatus that has an interest to singularize and consolidate what
images mean. A re-examination of images and languages in martial arts is necessary to resist
representation and engage in new ways of interpretative practice.

Visible Costumes and Visual Bodies

45
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 97-170.
46
For an extended discussion on the definition of cultural nationalism see Ronald Beiner ed., Theorizing
Nationalism (Albany: SUNY Press), 1999, and Yingjie Guo, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Search
for National Identity under Reform (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004).
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The construction of a cultural nationalism ignores the specificity of how the body is
visualized in these temporal settings. The way in which the body is presented in King Hu’s
martial arts films raises the question of how the body is fashioned according to specific
historical periods. His most emblematic films were set in the fourteenth to seventeenth
centuries and dealt with the Eastern Depot’s work in dynastic rule. This institution was formed
in 1420 during the rule of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty.
47
Their role was to serve as
the emperor's secret police and intelligence agency, and it was run mainly by eunuchs. This
setting in the Ming dynasty already places the bodies on screen in a fictionalized historical past.
On the one hand, this corresponds to Teo’s notion of cultural nationalism in its invocation of a
sense of nostalgia.
The setting of the Ming dynasty alongside depictions of the body draw on a shared
Chinese past but a past that is a non-experience. Nostalgia is for something that was never part
of a collective geographical vocabulary because many the audience members and its place of
production are already displaced. These films were not made in these regions of mainland
China, and the people watching also have not likely experienced these places. This is not to say
that nostalgia cannot be experienced by those who did not live in those conditions, but a
historical nostalgia works on a more fundamental level of affiliation. The use of a historical
setting, rather than a nostalgia, depicts a shared history between disparate regions.
Construction of a shared history is also provided by a shared system of signs, a
semiotics. Language, however, is not simply an utterance, but it is a conscious fashioning of
oneself within the confines of specific systematic expectations. King Hu’s Come Drink with Me,

47
Ray Huang, 1587, 114-116.
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Dragon Gate Inn, and A Touch of Zen are all period pieces, or as Teo explains, guzhuang pian.
Moreover, King Hu was meticulous in his gathering of materials for his films.
48
The sub-genre
implies specific identifiers. For example, the spoken language in the film itself is more archaic
rather than a contemporary Mandarin or other Sinitic language. More importantly, however,
the visible identifiers of the guzhuang pian point to the importance of how the body is quite
literally fashioned, namely through the depiction of period-specific costumes and hairstyles.
I assert the importance of the differentiation of the visible and visual. In Georges Didi-
Huberman’s work on the production of knowledge from images, he advocates for a distinction
between the visible and visual. Arguing against iconographic readings of the image which lead
to the consolidation of different narratives into a singularized history, Didi-Huberman explains
that the power in images lies precisely in their visuality and the openness to “not-knowledge.”
49

The visible refers to the things that the viewer sees within the image itself. For example, in A
Touch of Zen during the culminating fight, the visible elements in the scene are not only the
actors flying across the screen but also the setting of the bamboo grove. In other words, visible
objects are things that can be perceived readily by the viewer in a frame or sequence within a
frame. The visual, however, cannot be conflated with the visible. The visual for Didi-Huberman
is a network of symptoms that expresses the phenomenology of the gaze.
I argue that the visual is on the one hand this network of symptoms that reveals
something beyond what is visible or even invisible. On the other hand, the visual prompts us to

48
King Hu 胡金銓, “Cong pai guzhuang pian dianyin souji ziliao du qi” 從拍古裝片電影搜集資料讀起 [Collecting
Materials for the Making of Period Costume Moves], in Hu Jinquan de shijie 胡金銓的世界 [The World of King Hu],
ed. Huang Ren 黃仁 (Taipei: Taibeishi zhongguo dianying shiliao yanjiu hui), 272-278.
49
Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park:
Penn State University Press, 2009), 21.
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look beyond what is visible. The visual, therefore, is not content producing or functioning in an
economy of representation. It, instead, signals to the viewer to think and look beyond what is
visible critically towards how networks of sight are being formed in their specific contexts. This
looking beyond exposes the politics behind representation. Moreover, looking at the visual
rather than simply the visible allows the field of visibility to break open. The practice of looking
at what is visible only allows for objects in the field of vision to be observed. There is then a
limitation on what can be seen, understood, and analyzed. Visuality, on the other hand, allows
us to look at how visible objects function, traverse, appear and disappear, and move on the
screen. It considers that visible objects are not stationary in their position nor are they static in
their interpretation. The visuality of visible objects calls the viewer to pay attention to how
meaning is made beyond semiotic systems of representation.
The visible elements of the film contribute to the symptoms of visuality. The work of
costuming in King Hu’s films moves towards constructing a shared visible semiotics. The clothes
in the films attempt to remove any sense of anachronism in the films, placing the characters
into a specific dynastic period. Unlike films such as Baz Luhrman’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo
and Juliet that place the narratives from the past into a present that overtly highlights the
anachronistic elements of the film, King Hu’s films’ visible objects on screen seem to erase any
sense of possible anachronism and construct a sense of a shared history. The costumes create a
seamless visible landscape of the Ming dynastic period.
These visible elements of a shared yet distinct historical past exemplify the symptoms of
visuality as a network of visible objects. This network resists a semiotic reading of the visible as
a legible iconography. These costumes, such as the eunuch’s silk robes or the Shaolin monks’
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robes, do not simply represent or symbolize the Ming dynasty. Nor do they stand in as markers
for a dynastic period that transports the audience to the year 1500. The visuality of the visible
network of symptoms points to the fact that there is an assumption taking place. This
assumption is that such visible signifiers are implied to be recognizable to the audience, which
then positions the audience as participants of a shared historical experience. The fashioning of
the body is not so much what each character wears and what it represents. The way in which
the body is fashioned prompts a visuality that the audience is assumed to understand: the
visible costumes are supposed to be signifiers of a shared historical past. Clothes do not
become representative of a period, but they imply to the viewer that there is a shared past, a
shared vernacular of the past in images.
In the film A Touch of Zen, the past is first invoked by the presence of the Eastern Depot
eunuchs placing it squarely during the Ming dynasty. This narrative element places the film in a
past era, but it is not sufficient for creating a shared historical memory. The fashioning of the
body, therefore, becomes central. Moreover, these seemingly shallow bodily affectations reveal
contestations to official history and tensions with constructed histories in the films’
contemporary circulation. This historical costume is not only relevant for considering history as
the dynasties of the past, but as Edgar Wind explains, “historical costume of a national style
served as a disguised expression of a contemporary feeling.”
50
Wind’s quotation is apt despite
being about a different medium, painting, in that it brings together costuming, history, and the
conceptualization of the nation. It makes way for us to open readings on how characters are
composed and how their bodies are styled in relation to history and the nation. On the surface,

50
Edgar Wind, “The Revolution of History Painting,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2, no. 2 (October 1938): 118.
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the clothing, hairstyles, and makeup work towards further situating the actors into their
characters in the narrative. These elements also play out in the narrative in that it differentiates
characters from each other and gives the viewers insight into their status. For example, when
the Eastern Depot eunuchs are introduced, they are shown wearing black silk robes and the
headgear of eunuch officials. These more elaborate garments compared to Gu and Yang’s
simple pastel cotton frocks already position the eunuchs into a specific position within a divided
power hierarchy.
The characters’ sartorial accoutrements are the visible elements of the scene. They work
in a semiotic way where they signify within the narrative system of the film the Ming dynasty as
a historical period. These visible elements are, however, visually unstable. Their
representational status is not simply derived from the clothes themselves, but it is the narrative
elements that feedback into the semiotic system. In other words, the narrative and visible
stylings reinforce each other’s meanings and placement into a specific historical period. These
visible elements on their own, however, are not specific to the Ming dynasty. The simplicity of
Gu’s robes positions him within the low scholar or peasant class, and this focus in the hierarchy
prevents the specificity of court clothing. The visible is rendered vague.
This ambivalence in the system of signs evacuates any sort of stable meaning. The
fashioning of the body in the realm of the visible is no longer a simplified system of a silk robe
signifying a eunuch and a cotton frock signifying peasants during the Ming dynasty. These
vestments lose their meaning regarding a lived historical reality. The visible bodies themselves
do not represent an accurate historical representation of bodies during the Ming dynasty. They
also do not refer to a symbolic stabilized history of the Ming dynasty. They are, instead,
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referring to the system within the film itself, the construction of the “Ming” as a filmic universe.
The self-referential nature lies in that the system of signs in which the body is included is
already referring to itself as a stable world of the “Ming.” This representation of the “Ming” is
the entity that is constructed as historical in the parameters of the film, and the depiction of
history is not one that is automatically assumed to be real and shared. It is a self-referential
historical representation that necessitates looking at the instability of symptoms of history and
the ways in which visuality provides ways to intervene in assumptions of a shared historically-
based discursive practice.
The visuality of the way bodies are depicted constructs an unstable shared history.
Because the visible is reliant on the narrative and a self-referentiality in the visible, it is
precisely the visuality of the body that brings about a sense of a shared history that
simultaneously instantiates itself and brings into question the notion of a singular shared
history. The visuality of the bodies is a prompt to examine the discursive use of bodies in the
construction of history. Within the filmic Ming dynasty, the characters’ vestments are one
element that is particularly poignant because of the way in which they are both visible, but
their visuality renders them ambivalent and undetectable. The clothing blends itself into its
own constructed universe. The visible signs are not read as such, but they are signs that are
rendered invisible by their signification. This invisibility is not such that the audience cannot see
the visible elements nor is it such that the visible is obstructed by something else on the screen.
It is not a literal invisibility but rather a perceptual invisibility. Their invisibility comes directly
from their ability to at once create the dynastic universe around them and take part in that
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universe to the point where their presence as self-referential signifiers is no longer apparent to
the viewer.
It is precisely this invisibility of the visible that provides the foundation for a cohesive
visual universe. This universe is the unstable construction of a dynasty like the Ming dynasty, a
possible episode in the long duree of history. The visual universe is the network of visible and
invisible constructions that make up the film, and I assert that this visual universe in the case of
King Hu’s films is cohesive in its self-contained construction. The world that the bodies and their
self-referentiality create is one that is only within the film and does not refer to things outside,
such as conceptions of Chinese identities from Hong Kong or Taiwan. The Ming dynasty is a
shared world and cohesive visual universe in its circulation, but it is only so within its own
parameters.
While this visual universe is considered the Ming dynasty, the film’s encounter with
history and the inability for it to be a universally shared history in the Sinophone context is
where the cohesion breaks. It is due to the self-referentiality of the signification system as well
as the self-containment of a historical period described by the film that the depicted history
cannot be universalized. The signifiers in the film cannot accurately or authentically refer to
anything outside of the film itself. And so, the cohesive visuality that is built in the film
immediately disintegrates. Although it leaves room for other visualities, this self-referentiality
destabilizes itself as a reference for history.
The sense of stability in the cohesive historical world of the film as visual system is
paradoxical in nature. On the one hand, it reinforces its own stability in the self-containment of
the signification system. On the other hand, it is destabilized by its own system of signification
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when it is confronted with other visualities, histories, and audiences. Moreover, King Hu’s
insistence on constructing a cohesive visual world of the “Ming” dynasty in the guzhuang pian
form is purely an imaginative force within King Hu’s films.
51

With history as a common foundation for cultural nationalism as well as ethno-cultural
nationalism, these discursive practices are brought into question when the instability of
representation is revealed. History cannot be represented in an accurate or authentic way. Any
attempt to do so reveals the instability of such a construct in that the process of consolidation
and universalization of a history inevitably encounters other experiences and histories.
Furthermore, the deconstruction of history as a singular shared entity is revealed in the
semiotic system of fashioning the body in King Hu’s films. The sartorial elements and styles
depicted are not referents to an outside system of history, but rather, these elements of the
films are self-referential creating a network of symptoms. The visuality of the Ming dynastic
universe is paradoxically stable and destabilized. Therefore, the questioning of history through
the depiction of the bodies on screen does not leave space for cultural nationalism or ethno-
cultural nationalism to develop because the implicit fundamental foundation of a shared history
and culture is not sustainable. It is rather that the cohesive visuality provided by the film is what
instantiates and deconstructs Chineseness in relation to history.

Technology, Choreography, and History: Subversive Bodies in Motion

51
King Hu 胡金銓, Cong pai guzhuang dian ying zhao ziliao tan qi 從拍古裝電影找資料談起 [On finding material
to make costume drama films], in Hu Jinquan tan dianying 胡金銓談電影 [King Hu: On Film] ed. Hu Weiyao 胡維
堯 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2011), 91-93.
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The fashioning of the body is but one aspect that the physicality of the body is involved
in the semiotics of King Hu’s films. This semiotic system is deconstructed by its own
constructions. The network of visuality in the films also included the visuality of the body in
movement. Particularly, the ways in which the body moves and is choreographed with the help
of cinema as a form of technology construct a language that is beyond the spoken form.
Moreover, this form of bodily choreography allows for language to be a system beyond a
semiotic system. Through the movement of the body and manipulation through technology,
body language is an affective system of communication.
52
The form of affect I refer to here is
beyond spoken articulation and focuses on the visual form of affect. Haptic visuality, or the
exploration of a surface through movement, allows for the choreographed body to expose
specific images that push against language as a spoken form of communication.
53
Body
language as an affective exchange rather than a system of semantics for spoken or written
forms of language breaks open forms of representation and language as such. The implications
for Chineseness are also precisely in finding alternative ways of an exchange of sentiments
beyond any standardized form of language regulated by the state or hierarchies of cultural
authenticity.
Cinema as a medium allows for a specific audio and visual experience through its
technology. This is the first aspect of technology that allows for the body to be present in a way
that is not possible through any other media. Unlike written words, cinema and photography
show rather than describe the body. This showing of the body is also limited, especially in

52
For an analysis of affect and Chineseness in the transpacific, see Lily Wong, Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work,
Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
53
Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002), 2.
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relation to photography. As Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin have articulated, photography
marks the moment of the subject’s death. In the photo, the image is and will remain that
image. What interests me in the filmic medium is precisely what photos or at least photos as
singular elements, rather than a series of photographs, cannot do. That is, films can show an
active type of movement. The bodies can literally move across the screen even if it is only in a
sort of mimetic function of seeming to move from one place to another for the audience’s
contemporaneous viewing. This movement, albeit limited, or choreography, which implies a
certain intention, has not been adequately examined under the lens of martial arts films and
Sinophone studies. Martial arts cinema relies heavily on the possibility of an audio-visual
experience for choreography to emerge.
Aside from the medium of cinema in its power to depict motion, King Hu’s films utilize
technology in recognizable ways. This use led to the film A Touch of Zen winning a Technical
Grand Prize at Cannes in 1975. King Hu’s films further shows how choreography and technology
can come together in the editing process to construct an alternative form to language.
54
The
technologically choreographed movement in the films is one that includes editing and the
movements of martial arts. Technological editing of the scenes with its abrupt jump cuts along
with seeing the characters fly contribute to the ways in which technology and choreography
come together to create a haptic movement in the visual sphere.
The movement of the body is also quite literal in this aspect of the films’ visual field. The
body is not obstructed in any way, and in martial arts films, the body is precisely the focus in

54
King Hu 胡金铨, Yamada Hiroshi 山田宏一, Yudakawa Yuki 宇田川幸洋, Hu Jinquan wuxia dianying zuofa 胡金
銓武俠電影作法 [A Touch of King Hu], trans. Li He 厉河 & Ma Songzhi 马宋芝 (Hong Kong: Zhengwen she), 1998,
107.
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that it is through how bodies come into contact that films are conceived, and their narratives
are resolved. In relation to the body and movement, kinetic movement illustrates the most
visually dynamic affective exchange.
55
Most of the fighting scenes are devoid of verbal
dialogue. The bodies communicate on the most fundamental level by literally encountering
each other. Through the striking, blocking, pushing, and pulling, the kinetic movement is the
main form of an exchange of feeling. One aspect of feeling is the physical and corporeal touch.
From actor to actor, the tactile sensation of touch is visible through the swaying of their
clothes, the brushes of fists, and contact of kicks. The second aspect of this exchange is that
there is an element of narrative negotiation. Although a film already has a script and is
otherwise quite predictable in its outcomes, the literal “going through the motions” is essential
in facilitating the exchange of blows working towards the culminating moment of resolution in
King Hu’s films. The visualized kinetic movements in King Hu’s films also literalize the sense of a
power struggle in the films. It is because language has failed at some point in the film that
makes room for the corporeal choreography in films like, A Touch of Zen or Come Drink with
Me.
Choreographed movement, while aided by technology and the magic of film editing, is a
form of bodily motion. This motion on screen allows for a haptic visuality to emerge. Haptic
visuality is a direct citation of movement. It refers to the kinetic in terms of an energy to move
but also to movement that explores a visual field. In the film, A Touch of Zen, the movement in
the bamboo grove has proven to be one of the most cited mise en scenes in martial arts films.

55
Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009), 134.
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What makes this scene particularly affective is not simply how the scene is set up or the
verdant bamboo’s overwhelming presence in each frame. The bodies glide across the screen as
if they are telling the audience to track the scene according to their movement. The scenery is
literally explored through the movement of the body. The scene is constructed not by language
in a spoken written form, but rather its construction relies on the haptic movement of the body
for a description of the scene. The movement is on the one hand a visually guiding element,
and on the other hand, it is the precisely the haptic that makes the bamboo grove visible in the
first place.
Another example of this haptic visuality is the opening scene in Dragon Gate Inn. Within
the narrative, the film takes place in a rural region in China, but the film itself, however, was
filmed outside of mainland China. To cope with this literal distance from a regime of
authenticity connected to a geographical accuracy of filming locations, the haptic movement
that constructs a visuality is, therefore, essential in pushing beyond a model of construction
that emphasizes hierarchies of an authentic place or experience. The building action in the film
mainly unfolds at the Dragon Gate Inn. At the inn, the characters discuss their ties to each other
and strategy in preparation for battle. During the final leg of the film, the culmination of the
conflict takes places near the inn, but the battles happen outside. This location seems to be
more open and further out into the more mountainous regions of China.
In the final battle scene, the bodies moving about the screen work together in conflict
with the antagonizing eunuch. The haptic movement in the scene allows for the landscape to be
constructed and viewed by the audience. Although the landscape is not the main feature in the
film, it is an element within the diegesis that is supposed to reinforce or emphasize the
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authentic-ness of the story that is unfolding. As the backdrop, it is supposed be blending
seamlessly into a singular visual universe. This visual universe, however, is broken by the
hapticality of the bodies that glide, traverse, stumble, fall, and move otherwise on the screen.
In fact, the movement of the body brings attention to the fact that the landscape is one that is
constructed as an image of China rather than being set in China. The haptic movement exposes
the generalized image of landscape in the film. The landscape lacks a specific historicizing that is
revealed through the bodies’ explorations of the surface of the screen.
The resistance to grand narratives of history that the body’s haptic movements provide
reframe the relationship of the body to language. Language and systems of representations are
undermined by the presence of the body in haptic movement. Language and semiotics are no
longer the primary ways in which the body communicates. Bodies are, instead, networked into
affective systems of communication that go beyond what can be represented. Moreover,
bodies were not seen as purveyors of information but rather conveyors or tools for the
dissemination of information. This notion contributes to a hierarchy of communication.
Language became the way we exchange information, and the body was relegated to a
secondary position. The status of the body then allowed it to be subject to a different type of
regulation than language. The body is the unwieldy organ to be disciplined whereas language is
a semiotic system of expression.
Language is insufficient to describe the system the visual network of bodies in motion
and movement in that it does not factor in the possibility of movement. In other words,
semiotic systems of representation (i.e.: language systems) describe in a static way. It refers to
an utterance; that which has already been spoken and will always be spoken. The system is one
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that refers constantly to a past that itself teeters on the brink of collapse. The body, however,
can express or articulate through motion and the exploration of the surface or screen as an
exchange of sentiments or affect. In other words, the body can communicate and exchange
meaning that does not rely on a singularized codification and an act of interpretation of
meaning that is open and multiple.
A Touch of Zen as seen through the movement of bodies also sheds light on the
possibilities of finding alternative ways to exchange and communicate information. Although
the film was produced in Taiwan, its Sinophone circulation provides a basis for the film to be
considered within a network of haptic affect and movement. The speech in the film is
recognizably Mandarin, and it was released at a time where Mandarin dominated the cinema
scene before the rise of Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong. It lacks, however, a regulated tone or
accent and is not the language related to any specific state. Yet, the fact that it is Mandarin and
is circulating among Sinophone audiences with this language track is evidentiary of a certain
dominance and assumption of a lingua franca. The language used in vocalized exchange is
Mandarin rather than another dialect. Due to this form of an assumed hegemonic language in
circulation, speech is limited to what can be uttered in this specific form. With these linguistic
limitations, it is unsurprising that within the film speech is not central. Although this could be
said about martial arts films and the action genre more generally, in A Touch of Zen, speech
does even necessarily push the narrative forward. Speech, therefore, is relegated to a
secondary position.
The language used in the film is ostensibly identifiable as Mandarin, but its claim to an
authentic Chineseness is unstable and almost untenable. The language already starts to indicate
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the multiplicity of languages that can co-exist. Language is essential in understanding how
Chineseness is constructed, but it is also a limitation of how Chineseness can be understood.
Language can only allow the viewer to be privy to a certain type of Chineseness that is bound
up already in systems of regulation in one way or another whether it is by a network or by the
state.
The bodies that move on the screen are also bodies that contact each other and can
communicate without systematic language. The martial arts movements are choreographed
performances, but they are also utilitarian to a certain degree. For example, in the final
moments of the film, the sequence that takes places highlights the lack of language and an
emphasis on the body’s potential for languaging. The head abbot Hui-yuan is injured with his
battle with the eunuch general, and Yang, also injured, staggers towards the abbot. Before she
begins her journey, however, the exchange between Gu and Yang lacks a verbal exchange.
There is only an exchange through each other’s movements. When her task with Gu is finished,
Yang turns and moves again towards the abbot, silent and meditative. They move to initiate
and respond to each other’s movement. This highlights the exchange in bodily motions that
translates to a fluid exchange of emotions and information.
Although language as an outlet is foreclosed to a certain degree, communication is still
possible through the movement and fashioning of the body. This understanding of language
and the body in King Hu’s martial arts films poses the way in which Chineseness and Chinese as
a historically grounded shared category can be critiqued. “Chinese” as a category sustained by a
semiotic system of stable signs and history is undermined by the performance of the body. The
category is unstable and cannot move in a unidirectional way that a semiotic system implies. In
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fact, a series of bodily negotiations work to construct an image that goes against the unified or
singularly consolidated Chinese history. The history depicted presents a distilled universe to a
certain degree but also breaks open that idea that this history that is presented is the one and
only way to represent history. In other words, it is a sense of history that is one among
numerous possibilities of other presentations of history. It is the proverbial debate of history
with a capital “H” or the existence of multiple histories. Here, “History” consolidates Chinese
historiography, and histories reveals the constructedness of such a discourse. Chinese histories
deemphasize authentic history and places a renewed importance on individual languaged
iterations of what Chinese history can be.
What is at stake in constructing a history of China, especially from places in the Chinese
imaginary’s periphery, such as Hong Kong or Taiwan? Images of the past constituted by various
self-contained iterations, such as a series of films, is a practice in visual history making. These
fragmented images of China’s dynasties, either of the Song or Ming, each add their own
dimension to claims over the authenticity of such depictions and the degree to which those
outside of China proper can claim to have an authority to construct the past. Authority,
authenticity, ethno-cultural ties, and the interplay of genre conventions and affect all add to
the diverse ways that history is constructed. These elements are each partial, but they add to
the “veneer” that is Chinese history proper.
This tension between representations of China and Chinese culture from the various
regions of mainland China and Hong Kong or Taiwan has been a point of contention that
reaches back to dynastic China when the area that would be considered Hong Kong in the
modern era was classified as the undignified backwaters of the more erudite capital. Such
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tensions between mainland China and Hong Kong were further heightened with the Opium
Wars (1839 – 1860) when Hong Kong was conceded to the British Empire. Hong Kong’s status as
a British colony strained the already tenuous bond between Hong Kong and mainland China.
With the establishment of the republic and the PRC in 1911 and 1949 respectively, the division
between Hong Kong and mainland China was solidified, and the relationship between these
two places was problematized even more in high ideological periods, such as the Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976).
56

While the Cultural Revolution mainly took place in mainland China, the effects in Hong
Kong were tangible. One aspect of this ripple effect was the migration of people into Hong Kong
in the 1960s-70s. To escape from the Cultural Revolution in China, numerous politicians and
intellectuals fled to Hong Kong in search of protection from the fervent Maoist Red Guards. The
second aspect of this Cultural Revolution’s effect on Hong Kong also resonated with the global
leftist movements during that period. Ignited by their anger over labor disputes and inspired by
rumors of the Cultural Revolution, the Hong Kong Leftist Riots began in May and lasted until
December 1967.
Despite such a tumultuous history, scholarship has failed to address the intricate
webbing between Hong Kong and the PRC in the 1960s-70s in relation to how an image of
“China” or Chinese culture is constructed. Their relationship was particularly fraught during the
high ideological period of the 1960s Hong Kong, and Cultural Revolution China, making it even
more urgent to claim an ownership over Chineseness. While in the PRC, there was the overt

56
Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962―1976 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016).
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destroying of cultural relics, Hong Kong media and King Hu’s films sought other ways of
articulating Chinese culture.
This difference is also seen in King Hu’s embracing of the past as a contrast to the
prevalent attitudes during the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural Revolutionary China’s disavowal of the
past can be clearly observed in the destruction of objects from dynastic China. While the Red
Guards’ focus was religious and superstitious objects, such Buddhist statues and relics, they
also destroyed archaeological sites where items such as textiles and porcelain were being
excavated. One specific example of the Red Guards’ ideological fervor was the burning of the
tomb of Emperor Wan Li and the Empress Lady Wang.
57
This instance provides a stark contrast
to King Hu’s films. Rather than destroying a sense of the past, King Hu’s films celebrated and
displayed the past in its full color while being self-reflexive and consciously constructed.
Through these different forms of media that depict rather than ignore or erase China’s
dynastic past, Hong Kong and other previously peripheral sites in the Sinophone world are
identified as a new focus for Chinese history and culture. The place that was once considered
an unauthentic inheritor of Chinese culture began to assert itself through a visual practice as
the epicenter for an authentic Chinese visual history. This visual history of Chineseness was
being embraced in Hong Kong. The center of Chinese cinema and subsequently Chinese culture
as understood as being based in a shared historio-cultural past was no longer mainland China
but the previous dynastic backwaters. Rather than breaking with the past, King Hu’s films

57
Shelia Melvin, “China’s Reluctant Emperor,” The New York Times, September 7, 2011, accessed April 10, 2017.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/arts/08iht-wanli08.html.
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constructed a continuity with the dynastic past as a way to reconfigure and critique the notion
of a singular Chinese culture.
King Hu’s films and his own presence as a director in the Sinophone world speak to how
history plays a part in the construction of Chineseness. Chineseness as defined as having a
shared history that is based in the distant past is revealed to not be a stable concept, but
instead one that is in flux and subject to different individualized interpretations. Hu's migration
cannot be read as an exilic movement away from China to a space that is removed from China,
therefore giving rise to the necessity of a recovery of Chinese identity. I see Hu's migration as a
physical movement across geopolitical boundaries that does not mean that he escapes or is
exiled from a Chinese identity because he is not within the geographical boundaries of China.
The corporeal movement to Hong Kong and later between Taiwan and Hong Kong indicates a
reconfiguration and reframing of a Chinese cultural identity. More precisely, Hu's Chinese
identity is not lost through his physical migration, but it is reframed within his own context as a
Chinese filmmaker based in Hong Kong and in Taiwan.
Aside from his migration, King Hu’s films exemplify the ways in which the body
participates in overturning a singularized Chineseness. The body is comprised of two main
modes of depiction: the sartorial stylings and the haptic movement on screen. They perform a
critique of a distilled historicized Chineseness in two different ways but also both reference and
destabilize the hierarchical power of semiotic systems of representation. The styling of the
body and its ambivalence makes the clothing simultaneously recognizable yet unfamiliar, an
almost uncanny representation. More significantly, however, the clothing refers only to the film
itself and is trapped in a system of self-referentiality. The visual universe made up by the films is
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singularly pointing to its own limitations and other possibilities that may subvert its own claim
to a historical accuracy. The movement of the body in the visual field also works towards the
critique of a singular Chineseness through the haptic movement as well as the affective
exchange in the interaction of bodies. The body, on the one hand, explores through the haptic
motion on screen and exposes the ambivalent landscape, which functions similarly to the
sartorial accoutrements in the films. On the other hand, the affective exchange between bodies
shows the potential in the exchange of information and emotions without verbal expression.
They work to undermine a narrative of Chineseness based in a linear and consolidated
historiography. Chineseness is not completely dismantled but there is a diversification and
possible multiplicity that exists in a narrative that is assumed to be singular and central.

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III. Sinophone Screaming: Examining Bruce Lee’s Visuality and Phonicity
Martial arts films include many sub-genres. Aside from the wuxia or swordplay films of King Hu
and other directors, kung fu films are one of the most globally recognizable martial arts sub-
genres from Hong Kong. The earliest kung fu films focused on legendary kung fu masters, such
as Fong Sai-yuk and Wong Fei-hung, made in the 1930s. These films reimagined the lives of
historical figures and folk heroes, but they also receded in popularity in favor of supernatural
swordplay movies that were tied to the resurgence in wuxia fiction serialized in newspapers
with authors like Jin Yong.
58.
It was not until the late 1960s and 1970s when kung fu films
swayed the attention of theatergoers that a new subgenre claimed the interest of the public.
Because of kung fu films, fresh-faced stars emerged onto Hong Kong’s cinematic screen and
became emblems for Hong Kong cinema in general. One such star is Bruce Lee. Hong Kong
martial arts films cannot be referenced without the image of Lee on the silver screen, and Lee
has become one of the most globally recognized figures associated with kung fu and Hong Kong
cinema overall because of his influence in film practice and the popularity of his kung fu films.
Despite Lee's own turn away from emphasizing boundaries and styles, some scholars
have tried to position Lee within East-West dichotomies.
59
Discourses about Bruce Lee's films
have also focused on the notion of cultural nationalism. Aside from cultural nationalism in
China and in relation to diaspora studies, the martial artist has also been deployed in relation to
looking at the emergence of nationalism and leftist movements in the third world during the
1970s. Lee and martial arts films more broadly have been read in terms of his influence in the

58
Christopher Hamm, Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 2004), 1-3.
59
Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 110.
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formation of black solidarity.
60
This type of scholarship can be problematic in that it continue to
embed Lee in binaristic models, where Lee is either posited as the “self” or “other.” It was not
until recent discussions by Paul Bowman, a scholar and pioneer of martial arts studies, that
Bruce Lee was recuperated as a character and persona that exceeds such essentialist models.
61

Bowman looks at Lee's philosophy through a post-Marxian and post-structuralist lens citing
Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek among others. Bowman's work reinterprets Lee in a way that
illuminates the possibility of a multiplicity of readings of Lee's figure. As a result, the martial arts
star is a flexible icon that surpasses and resists overly simplistic interpretations.
Following Bowman's exploration of Lee's on-screen persona and Sylvia Chong’s analysis
of Bruce Lee’s movement-image, I argue that Lee's filmic persona necessitates an in-depth
consideration alongside issues of language and the visualization of the body. My reading of the
martial arts star is predicated on the lack of an original soundtrack and voices in his films. Due
to the distribution of Lee's films across the Pacific, there is no universal language that can be
assumed by the audience. Therefore, the films come with a plethora of language dub options,
including Cantonese, Mandarin, and English among others. Aside from their global circulation,
Bruce Lee’s films are widely viewed in Sinophone communities. The linguistic disparities
between Sinophone spaces, however, is a site of difference. A systematic universal language
track, therefore, is both absent and impossible to construct. In the films that circulate either on
the global or Sinophone market, all the languages are dubbed or subtitled, and as a result,

60
Sundiata Cha-Jua, “Black Audiences, Blaxploitation and Kung Fu Films, and Challenges to White Celluloid
Masculinity” in China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema, ed. Poshek Fu (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2008), 199-223.
61
Paul Bowman, Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film-Fantasy-Fighting-Philosophy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 165-189. See
also Paul Bowman, Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon Through Film, Philosophy, and Popular Culture (New
York: Wallflower Press, 2013).
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there is no original language that Bruce Lee speaks or can speak in his films. In place of a
systematic spoken language, a mode of visual-aurality emerges as an alternative. The body is
the focus of the visual, and from this visual, aurality, a network of sound and sound presence,
emerges. Visual-aurality is manifest in three main ways. The first is the way in which “language”
is spoken in the films from the practices of dubbing and subtitling. The second is the presence
of the scream that allows for a reassertion of the visualized presence of the body. The scream
simultaneously stands in for language and signifies the breakdown of language. I then focus on
a close reading of the frozen image of Bruce Lee, an image that through death defies death
itself and makes its corporeality, or bodily presence, more present.

Languaging Bruce Lee: Dubbing and Subtitling for a Global Audience
Lee was born in San Francisco to his Cantonese Opera star father, Lee Hoi-Cheun, and mixed-
race mother, Grace Lee. The Lees returned to Hong Kong with their new infant in tow, and
Bruce Lee spent his formative years in the then colony of the British Empire. After getting into
some trouble with local gangs, Lee migrated to Seattle and attended university there, studying
Eastern philosophies and religion. Eventually, Lee moved to California and began his career in
Hollywood. One of his most well-known roles was Kato, capable butler to the less than capable
Green Hornet, played by Van Williams. Lee, however, was unable to land a starring role in his
own television series, which eventually casted David Carradine as a half Chinese-half White
Shaolin monk.
62

62
Bruce Thomas, Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit (Berkeley: Frog Ltd, 1994), 3-145.
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From his early years, Bruce Lee’s life was intertwined with cinema. Lee’s earliest
appearance on film was as a guest star in Golden Gate Girl (1941). His father was also an actor,
and father-son duo first worked together in The Birth of Mankind (1946) and then co-starred in
The Kid (1950). Lee continued to act in Hong Kong until 1959 when he starred as Sam in The
Orphan (1960). Lee first moved to San Francisco and then to Seattle in 1959. Eventually, Lee
was cast into a supporting role in Marlowe (1969). Lee also continued to appear in different
television series, such as Longstreet in 1971. Although Lee had supporting roles in Hollywood,
like Kato and the role in Marlowe, he became disheartened by his prospects in Hollywood when
Carradine was cast as the main character in The Shaolin Monk. Lee moved back to Hong Kong
and starred in The Big Boss (1971) and Fist of Fury (1972), both directed by Lo Wei, to much
acclaim. The success of this film led to the growth of Lee's own directing career with films like
The Way of the Dragon (1972) and Game of Death (1972-1973). Lee died while Game of Death
was still being shot, which lead to an incomplete film that was later pieced together and
released. Footage of Lee was also used by Robert Clouse to make Enter the Dragon (1973),
which was released by Golden Harvest.
Lee’s untimely death also led to a barrage of films that continue to use his image in
various ways and range in terms of genre. From Quentin Tarantino’s slight nod to Lee’s iconic
tracksuit from Game of Death in Kill Bill (2003), biopics about Bruce Lee’s life, such as Bruce Lee
My Brother, documentaries that attempt to piece his life together, such as I am Bruce Lee
(2012), to the continuing of Bruce Lee-like characters in Bruceploitation films, Lee has
seemingly refused to recede from the screen. The Bruce Lee franchise is also sustained by
numerous biographical books, memoirs that relate people’s encounters with the famous
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martial artist, and Bruce Lee’s own writing have also surfaced onto the endless market for
Bruce Lee goods. Bruce Lee’s own published writing, however, has mainly focused on fighting
systems and the development of Jeet Kune Do. Lee founded this martial arts system, which
emphasized the combination of different forms and lack of a reified style. He says, “Jeet Kune
Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it
can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and,
likewise, uses any techniques or means which serve its end.”
63
In other words, JKD is a formless
form that does not limit the practitioner but instead connects them to an endless arsenal of
martial arts styles.
His legacy, therefore, is not strictly limited the role of an author, actor, or director, but
his continuing presence highlights the importance of bodies, body systems, and their potential
to communicate. Although he had written books that seemed almost philosophical in nature,
they emphasized the movement of the body in the performance of martial arts. And so, why is
the body so central in the legacy and representation of Bruce Lee? Moreover, what can Bruce
Lee’s body and movement communicate that other forms of language cannot?
A key factor to note is the circulation of Lee’s films that is connected to his own
movement across national borders. From the moment he was in Hong Kong, Lee’s presence on
the big screen was undeniable, and as his career as a martial artist propelled him into the
screens in America, he became a well-known figure in Hollywood as well. Although he was not
cast in the Kung Fu television series, Lee’s presence in Hong Kong films pushed him forward into
global stardom. Films like The Big Boss and Fist of Fury were not only popular in Hong Kong, but

63
Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Santa Clarita: Black Belt Communications, 1975), 12.
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they rose to popular cult status in the United States and beyond. With this global audience,
Lee’s popularity surged. At the same time, to make these films viable in different film markets,
language is an essential element of cinema.
Language in martial arts cinema has had a long practice of dubbing. While this may
seem as though Lee’s films are simply following the conventions of martial arts cinema, Lee’s
films and the dubbing practices differ significantly. Lee’s films did not have a standardized
sound or language track. There were instead numerous languages that were produced as
dubbed tracks for the films. In his interview with Pierre Berton, Lee explains that most films
were dubbed. Berton asks, “Well how can you play in Mandarin movies if you don't even speak
Mandarin?” Lee answers, “Well, first of all, I speak only Cantonese.” In fact, Lee continues to
say that someone else’s voice is used to dub the Mandarin track.
64
Lee’s image speaks on the
screen but with a different voice, one that is not his. Lee is verbally silent in some of these
versions, and so there is not a singular more “authentic” or “real” version of the film.
This lack of a singular language track reconfigures what language is in martial arts
cinema. Aside from making the film more marketable to a global audience, it also works
towards the disavowal of the power of spoken language. None of the tracks hold a totemic
power. One track cannot represent Lee’s presence more than the others. Although it may seem
as if the Cantonese language track would be more authentically “representative” in that it is
Lee’s native language, the Cantonese was not recorded simultaneously with the film action. It is
also a dubbed track. Spoken language on any track is not the most central element in the film

64
Bruce Lee: The Lost Interview, dir. Michael Rothery, for The Pierre Berton Show.
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because it is interchangeable. The films and their dubbed tracks move away from spoken
language as the main form of power and communication.
With spoken language sidelined, the body becomes the main mode of communication
and formation of power. For Lee’s films, communication and exchange happen through the
slightest gestures and explosive fights. For example, in Way of the Dragon, the bodily
interaction between Lee and a go-between for the Italian mafia boss signals the viewer to pay
close attention to embodiment. An Italian mafia boss wants to buy out the Chinese restaurant
where Lee’s character works. To give the workers and restaurant owner a warning, a Chinese
go-between, who wears flamboyant clothing and has a stereotypically high-pitched voice,
approaches the workers and Lee in particular to tell them that they should leave while the boss
is offering a generous deal. The go-between is also a Han Chinese person that attempts to use
his identity as leverage between the two parties. He negotiates on behalf of the mafia boss. As
he is leaving from his first confrontation with Lee’s character, he grabs Lee’s belt and runs it
through his fingers. There are numerous ways to read this interaction, including the queer
interaction between Lee and the go-between.
65
However, I focus on the performative gesture
of the go-between. With the tensions of having the restaurant taken over by the Italian mafia
and the go-between siding with this structure of power, the power dynamic between Lee and
the go-between is distinctly hierarchical, and this is reflected and perpetuated by the go-
between’s gesture. Lee’s body is subject to the touch, and the go-between is the agent of the
touch. While Lee’s face in the scene is explicitly not welcoming and visibly angered by the

65
Chris Berry, “Stellar Transit: Bruce Lee’s Body or Chinese Masculinity in a Transnational Frame,” in Embodied
Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, eds. Martin and Larissa Heinrich (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 218-234.
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action, the touch cannot be retaliated against. This form of physical exchange heightens the
sense that the performative movements of the bodies on the screen communicate and
reinforce information about characters’ relationships to one another and the power dynamics
that are created in the films.
Bodily performance is most overtly manifest in martial arts. Martial arts in the visual
universe of Lee’s films is one of the central elements that provides a space for exchange of
information. The style of martial arts portrayed by some of Lee’s films do not fall into a specific
style or category. Lee confronts the problem of martial arts styles in his films the same way in
which he developed JKD and philosophy. While Lee and his colleagues at the restaurant bond in
the back-alley way in Way of the Dragon, the issue of martial arts style is brought to the
forefront, and in this scene, Lee is able to communicate not only to those within the frame but
also to the viewer about the problem of the reified boundaries of martial arts styles. The
restaurant workers brag about how they have practiced and earned various experiences in
stylized martial arts. They demonstrate various moves, but the workers ultimately lose in the
face of Bruce Lee’s martial arts. Lee’s style of martial arts is not named, suggesting that it might
be akin to JKD, the style of no style. In other words, within the film, there is a citation of Lee’s
philosophy of martial arts. It is unnamed and unburdened of the weight of traditional styles
that have specific movements and flourishes that make it unsuitable for street fighting. This is
further reinforced when the mafiosos crash the session. The restaurant workers prove to be
relatively powerless while confronting the mafia boss’s henchmen. The aggressors push and
power their way through the group until they reach Lee. His styleless martial arts retaliates
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against their antagonists proving that once again this philosophy is physically superior to
consolidated styles of martial arts.
On the one hand, Lee’s forms of martial arts and philosophical leanings critique the
categorization and solid boundaries between different styles. On the other hand, the
particularity of Lee’s persona and its Chineseness is undeniable. While other scholars have
argued, the characters and storylines resonate with an image of cultural nationalism that
reinforces a sense of Chinese motherland.
66
This reading of cultural nationalism, however, runs
against the fluidity that Lee’s philosophy propounds. Consolidating a boundary between what is
Chinese and what is not Chinese, cultural nationalism describes one effect of Lee’s persona, but
it cannot explicate the complex network between Lee’s real-life philosophy, his film characters,
and the global network of circulation and his influence in Asia and global decolonization
movements.
67

Rather than cultural nationalism and a Chinese cultural motherland, when examining
the representation of Lee on the screen, looking at Lee in relation to the Sinophone is essential
in that it considers the extended networks of circulation of Lee’s image and its localization.
Bruce Lee cannot simply embody the nation. Echoing Meaghan Morris, his image allows us to
rethink and invert national hierarchies.
68
At the same time, Chineseness is not completely
eschewed in favor of a global citizenship. There is rather, a strategically deployed version of
Chineseness or a Chineseness that can be multiple in iteration. It is not an essentialized Chinese

66
Teo, Hong Kong Cinema, 111-113.
67
M. T. Kato, “Burning Asia: Bruce Lee’s Kinetic Narrative of Decolonization,” Modern Chinese Literature and
Culture 17, 1 (Spring 2005): 62-99.
68
Meaghan Morris, “Learning from Bruce Lee: Pedagogy and Political Correctness in Martial Arts Cinema,” in
Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, eds. Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (Abingdon: Routledge,
2001), 171-186.
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identity that Lee embodies, but rather, it is the possibilities for multiple “Chinesenesses.” Lee’s
image has a sinophonicity, a resonance that reaches the global.
This multiplicity and preempted localization are expressed in the ambivalent use of
Chinese history and signification as a layer on top of Lee’s body. While Big Boss and Way of the
Dragon do not explicitly confront the past and are set in the contemporary period of the
making of the films, Fist of Fury deals with historical events. Rather than attempting to
represent an authentic image of the past, Fist of Fury begins with tropes that are familiar to
those involved or interested in martial arts, and these tropes intertwine with a historical
setting, particularly Japan’s encroachment into China during the Sino-Japanese Wars. From the
narrative, the film is already couched in a partially mythologized setting. In the film, the main
character of Chen Zhen, played by Lee, returns to his martial arts school to find that his master,
Huo Yuanjia has died. A series of events ensue that places Lee’s body and fighting skills in the
limelight, and eventually, Chen Zhen learns that his master had been poisoned. Huo’s presence
in the film, however, is not a solidly corporeal one. The audience never sees Huo alive in any of
the scenes, and the only time we “see” the Jingwu School’s master is in a closed casket. His
body is nowhere to be seen. At the same time, Huo Yuanjia was a real martial artist and
historical figure, but his legacy has also been shrouded in different exaggerated legends and
reimagined in numerous ways in other forms of media. The lack of a body and the narrative
citation of Huo couches the film in a ghostly mythology. This mythology is based geographically
in Shanghai, but it also remains evasive because of its non-presence. It is a sense of
Chineseness, but that Chineseness is disembodied.
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At the same time, the particularity of Chen Zhen’s Chinese identity is present in the film,
especially through the Chinese versus Japanese narrative setup. Each group attempts to assert
their own superiority, and it seems to be on a national scale. Must the scaling of the Chinese-
Japanese divide always be national, especially when the national has taken on different
meanings with the growing power of the state? While martial arts, modernity, and the nation
may be intricately intertwined, the crux of this reading lies in the assumption that it must
already be about the national.
69
In other words, a nationalistic reading is overdetermined. The
scale to which one reads allegory or extended metaphor is essential to consider in that it closes
off or opens possibilities of reading. Fist of Fury as national allegory is indeed one possibility,
but the nation must be read in a way that can break open the distinctive boundaries of the
nation.
And so, as an alternative to reading of Fist of Fury as expressing cultural nationalism, the
ties between nationalism and modernity, or as national allegory, the film emphasizes
collectivity on a scale that is smaller and individual. The facade of a national allegory also begins
to crack when examining the narrative arc. It is not simply the Japanese versus the Chinese, but
Huo’s death is caused by a traitor within the Jingwu School. The film reveals that the chef is the
one who poisoned the master. The final scene also betrays the sense of a Chinese collectivity.
As an inspector convinces Chen to turn himself for his crime of killing multiple people involved
in his master’s death, the inspector tells Chen to trust him because he is Chinese like Chen.
Lee’s character, however, is delivered by the inspector to a firing squad and ends with the

69
Siu Leung Li, “Kung Fu: Negotiating Nationalism and Modernity,” Cultural Studies 15, no.3/4 (October 2001), 515-
542.
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image of Chen Zhen leaping into the air in a freeze frame. In this case, Chinese as a cultural
identifier is used as a tool by the inspector to convince Chen to go to an early grave. Being
Chinese is not an uncontested form of solidarity in the film.
To critique this sense of a national collectivity, the film acknowledges the national
implications of individual action, but also simultaneously exemplifies and highlights the
singularity of individual action. The singular individual is, therefore, not simply a conduit for
national sentiment, but an acting agent of their own volition. In the film, there are two
examples of the nod to the national: the sign gifted to the Jingwu School displaying “Sick Man
of East Asia” (東亞病夫) and the sign in front of the park that says, “No Dogs and Chinese
Allowed” (狗與華人不得入内). The sign given to the Jingwu School by the Japanese signals a
difference between the Chinese and Japanese as two distinct groups. A possible meaning is that
the Chinese, as a group or collective, are the sick men of east Asia. Another meaning emerges,
however, in the fact that it is presented as a gift to the Jingwu School. They are a specific group
that is targeted by the gift. Here, Derrida’s explanation of the gift is apt.
70
The sign is outside of
a giving and taking model as it is almost purely given as a symbolic gesture rather than as an
exchange of objects. Furthermore, the gift of the sign only necessitates a response.
This gifting and call to response reinforces the presence of a singular individual that
contrasts to a national group of collective. The response that the gifted sign elicits is an action
on the part of Chen Zhen. His response is not to express gratitude but to re-gift it to the
Japanese martial artists. In the sequence, Chen Zhen goes to the Japanese dojo with the sign,

70
John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, “On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion,
Moderated by Richard Kearney” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 54-78.
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and he takes on all the Japanese martial artists there. Eventually, he defeats every single one of
them and then forces them to literally eat the sign, reflecting his earlier promise to make them
eat their words. He is not backed up by another group but is, instead, an individual who acts on
his own volition. He faces all the antagonists alone, separating himself from the group and, by
extension, from a purely national allegory. His return and rejection of their gift reasserts a chain
of giving and taking rather than as the gift or gift giving. In this process, he exposes their
intentions for the gift. It was not simply to give and not to receive.
Lee’s response to the gift is also a corporeal assertion. The character that Lee plays is an
embodiment of individual action. In his fight at the Japanese dojo, it is his singular presence
against the group of Japanese fighters. In the frame, his body is the one that is put on display.
As he surveys his surroundings, Lee’s figure is in the center of the shot emphasizing his
individuality. It is not a mass of people nor an unidentified character, but rather, it is Lee’s body
as the center of the attention. Although the scene narratively implicates his watching, it visually
set up to let the viewers see his individual body offset from the rest of the figures in the
sequence. The body in this case is not an allegorical Chinese body that can speak for a national
group. The image of his body on the screen is a singular body that expects to be viewed.
The mapping of a Chinese identity is inextricably bound to the representation of Lee’s
corporeal body. The body is a site of signification that reflects on the sense of a collective
identity and normative performance, but it is also a figure that at times acts individually to
speak back against such sweeping identity categories. This privileging of the performance of the
body allows for Lee’s films to go beyond simply national categories while also emphasizing its
particular historical conditions. Such contentious but fluid representation works in two ways in
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relation to Bruce Lee because of his ambivalent boundaries between his life, philosophy, and
filmic persona. Lee’s philosophical leanings and martial arts style of no style resist
categorizations and emphasize utility. This strong push back against essentialized categories of
Chinese, Japanese, or Korean martial arts among others champions the possible fluidity
between these styles that breaks down solidified boundaries. Lee’s life blends into his cinematic
representations as well. While the disavowal of categorical boundaries is not as distinct as in his
martial arts philosophy, a critique of a monolithic Chineseness based in a shared cultural
identity is still present. In his films, the characters’ Chineseness is the starting point almost
taken for granted. Yet, the movement of the narrative and the broken trust with the chef and
police inspector shed light on the complications of an assumed shared identity based on
primordial lines.
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Notions of a Chinese identity are mapped into different networks of meaning
rather than being bound to solely national or collective categories.

Screaming Screens: Audio-Visual Language and the Visceral Image of Death
While Bruce Lee’s films balance delicately between and work through categorical
identities, they also navigate through cinema in ways that break down divisions between sound
and image. Sound in Bruce Lee’s films works in tandem with the visual images on screen. There
is, however, a prioritization of the visual representation of the body over the spoken language
track through the narrative and visual rhetoric of the films. While the importance of spoken
language is minimized, the sound of these films is not muted. Sound, in fact, plays an equally

71
Arjun Appuradai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 14.
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large role in Lee’s films. Drawing on Fred Moten’s work on Black Mo’nin,’ this section argues
that Lee’s visual corporeality is intricately tied to issues of the visual, the aural, and death.
Already, Lee’s legacy is tied to his early death, and this connection is reinforced by the images
on the screen, by cinema and photography’s connection to death, and by the tenuous
relationship between sound and image. In this section, I first discuss the issues between
visuality and aurality as a relationship where one or the other is vying for priority. This
discursive competition, however, is not one that leads to a resolved relationship but instead
points to the death of the subject, even if that death is momentary. I then move to analyze the
connection between death and cinema with Lee’s sound and image. The final portion of this
section examines Lee’s image and sound as a cinematic entity that both revels in and defies
death. And so, the representation of Lee in the cinematic medium renegotiates visuality and
aurality on screen and brings forward the ambivalent intersection between life and death in the
filmic form.
Looking at the sound of an image, I draw on Fred Moten's work on Black Mo'nin'.
Although Moten's work focuses on the black moan and mourning, his work highlights the
connection between aurality and visuality. He looks at the image, performance of the image,
and Roland Barthes' analysis of Emmett Till. Moten challenges the ocularcentrism that
surrounds the reading and viewing of photographs. This ocularcentrism described by Martin Jay
in Downcast Eyes is the privileging of vision and sight over other senses. Ocularcentrism gained
resonance with the rise of scientific discourse. Evidence that was provided by the other senses
was suspect whereas sight provided truth and a sense of the real. Vision, however, cannot be
trusted in this way with new technologies. The concept of vision as having a truth claim also
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contributes to oppressive cultural, social, and political hegemonies. Vision as a singular
sensorium that is authentic and true rules out other possibilities and limits the possibilities of
what is seen, especially with the rise of vision technology, such as closed-circuit television and
surveillance. Vision, therefore, needs to be reconfigured to bear in mind the visual, where what
is seen is reflects the intersection of networks of understanding and subjective experience.
Unlike vision and sight, the visual includes the consideration of other senses that contribute to
how the image or moving image is understood and deployed as a mode of communication and
language.
Moten’s work on Emmett Till’s photograph articulates the complex relationship
between the image and the sense, particularly sound. He argues that all photos "bear a phonic
substance.”
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This phonic substance of the photographic image is also a material experience
leading to political resistance. It is also a resistance of the reduction of sound of an image that
make the image mute, flattening and dangerously universalizing the experience of the phonicity
of the image. Although Moten's work sheds light on a case and the experience of Blackness, his
theory about the visual and phonic bring together elements that seem to be mutually exclusive
or positioned in opposition to each other. Moten's work argues against the dominance of the
ocularcentric approach to the image, but he does not necessarily dispose of the visuality of the
image. His intervention is that the "aural aesthetic is not the simple reemergence of the voice
of presence, the visible and graphic word.”
73
In other words, Moten’s work is about
repositioning the regimes in which we consider the experience of the image. In fact, in his

72
Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 62.
73
Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 65.
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configuration of Black Mo’nin’ the phonic and visible necessitate each other. They invoke each
other mutually to fully experience this image and its impact. Black Mo’nin in the Till photo is
already present and intertwined with the complex visuality of the image that includes the
network of meaning. This visual network is a system of signs and signification that point to the
context, circulation, and reception of the image. The aural element, Black Mo’nin,’ is also part
of the photograph that is already present with the visual. Moten’s work informs how we view
blackness, the black experience of racism, death, and mourning, and the phonographic in the
photographic.
Extending Moten's conceptualization of the sound of the image, the visceral scream and
grunt that emerges from Lee must be considered alongside Lee's visual image that resists
universalism and asserts a political stance. The scream is emblematic of Lee, and the two,
sound and image, invoke each other. They cannot be separated, and there is a phonic
substance to his image. The scream disturbs and reverberates while the body moves with
violent impetus. This violence in the image and sound breaks down representational reading
with its own verbal presence, its own voice. The scream resists symbolism and rationality and
asserts its own politics: a politics of productive violence that forges and destroys affiliations and
connections. Lee's image cannot be silenced. The image and sound already preclude their own
agency. Sound and image are inseparable.
At the same time, however, this productive visual and aural disturbance is haunted by
death. This simultaneity of sound, image, and death is most effectively seen in the final scene of
Fist of Fury. The figure is literally frozen in time, and the audience is not privy to his death.
There is a looming sense of uncertainty. The scream that emerges from the screen marks the
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death of Chen Zhen. This filmic death also invokes a scream that permeates through to Lee’s
actual death in that the actor’s death is understood as being part of this visual network. The
visible representation of Chen Zhen’s visuality is infused with the networks of representations
of Lee’s image. In this scene, the visual and aural cannot be extricated from each other, and one
cannot be privileged over the other. While the image is a freeze frame, the sound continues
through to the end of the film. The frozen shot literally has a phonic substance because of its
media.
Unlike the photograph, film as a medium already assumes a phonicity. Their
relationship, however, seems to remain separate and stratified in some cases. The aural
dimension of cinema has mainly been considered as either speech or soundtrack. With Lee’s
films, speech is rendered less important, but sound is continually highlighted by the presence of
the scream. Sound in Lee’s films cannot be simply considered soundtrack because the scream is
something that has an ambivalent status. It is part of a soundtrack in that it is part of a larger
soundscape, but it also communicates like speech. Unlike the soundtrack and speech, it does
not communicate a clear message, nor does it work to advance the narrative of the films. The
scream is its own sound presence. It is the phonic substance of the film and points to an aurality
related to death and cinema. The relegation of speech and soundtrack in favor of the visceral
scream is also seen in the last scene in Fist of Fury. The image is frozen in time, and there is no
speech at all. Only the sound of his scream resonates with the image on the screen. The phonic
persists with the still image. At this moment, the film becomes like a photograph.
Lee’s film straddles the line between photography and cinema. What these two media
have in common with Lee is their attachment to death. In his book on photography, Roland
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Barthes examines the effects that photographs have on the viewer.
74
Two elements of the
photograph come together for Barthes: the studium and the punctum. The former refers to the
context and generalized meaning of the photograph, and the latter is the element that pierces
or punctures the viewer.
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More importantly, the photograph marks a moment of death. In the
examples Barthes gives, the photos he examines are images of subjects before their execution
or death. It is also important to note that the presence of the photograph also marks the death
or end of a moment. The moment pictured is one that has already passed and cannot be
relived. The photograph is the trace of that moment left behind that depicts a moment that did
not survive. Till’s phonic photograph depicts the death of an individual and marks the passing of
time, and Lee’s image in Fist of Fury with its photographic quality also implies the death of the
character and a future moment that the audience is not privy to seeing. That future moment of
death is depicted in an ambiguous way. The photographic ontology of the image reinforces
Lee’s connection to an ending moment and to the medium of photography itself.
At the same time, the image of Chen Zhen’s assumed death also speaks to the cinematic
medium and its relation to the ontology of the photographic medium. While it is a still image, it
remains a work of cinema. Here, I draw on Andre Bazin’s work on cinema, trace, and
mummification.
76
Bazin’s work begins with an analysis of the plastic arts with things like
sculpture and their relationship to the preservation of likenesses. He traces the impetus to save
our image back to the Egyptians: “The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw
survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body...To preserve,

74
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 25.
75
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 43.
76
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no.4 (Summer
1960): 4-9.
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artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so
to speak, in the hold of life.”
77
In other words, the process of mummification preserved the
body against time and to allowed it to survive past its own death. For Bazin, unlike painting,
cinema and photography have an element of “realism” that is not affected by the subjectivity of
the artist.
For images of Lee, the “realism” of his movements and image have been a source of
debate. As Hsiung-Ping Chiao argues, Lee’s form of martial arts performance eschews the
fantastical in favor of more realistic movements.
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Yet, this argument is not about whether or
not film or cinema is real. Bazin’s point, however, about the connection between the
preservation of the body and its parallels with the preservation of an image or likeness comes
forward with Lee’s cinematic image. In the case of Chen Zhen, the freeze frame still with its
photographicness allows for the body depicted to be visually embalmed. His body defies death
because it is captured in a still. This freeze frame forces Lee’s body to be removed from time. It
does not suffer the effects of time. The still “stow[s] away neatly” Lee’s image and likeness.
79

While it is not Lee himself necessarily in the diegesis of the film, the character and his image is
made static. The character is in this way an extension of Lee’s visuality. Lee’s body, therefore, is
forced to remain visible, always representing the character and himself. Photography and its
relation to cinema makes this preservation possible but also assumes his on-screen death.
Cinema preserves his image beyond his own life both within the film as Chen Zhen and non-
diegetically as an image of Bruce Lee.

77
Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 4.
78
Hsiung Ping Chiao, “Bruce Lee: His Influence on the Evolution of the Kung Fu Genre,” Journal of Popular Film and
Television 9, no.1 (1981): 30-42.
79
Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 4.
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The medium of film also informs the reading of death in Lee’s cinema. Film and
photographic media connect Lee’s films to the concept of death. The photographic qualities of
his films and the mummification and trace left in cinema tie up Lee’s image in death. With this
feature of the media representation of Lee, the metafictional element of Lee’s life also enters
the fray. Lee’s untimely and unexpected death added to his mythology as an invincible figure,
but it is also his death that made him emerge as a figure whose representation always already
refers to his real-life death. As Sylvia Chong writes, Lee’s persona is “birthed from a womb that
is essentially a tomb.”
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In other words, Lee’s representational life is provided by his death. His
films are in a network of meaning where death is constantly present and inescapable. His death
refers to his films, and the films refer to his figurative and real-life death.
Sylvia Chong’s chapter on Bruce Lee in Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies
in the Vietnam Era sheds light on how Bruce Lee’s persona participates in the imagination of
the body during the Vietnam War. In “Being Bruce Lee: Death and the Limits of the Movement-
Image of Martial Arts,” Chong astutely argues that Lee’s death and the subsequent replication
of his persona align with what Deleuze calls the movement-image: “Bruce Lee is not so much a
character, a psychological depth, or a mere visual icon, as he is a potential for movement and
agency.”
81
The images of Lee in seemingly still motion point to an impending motion and a
possible subjectivity. This agency is also brought about by the discontinuities of Lee’s films and
through Bruceploitation.

80
Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and the Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham:
Duke University Press), 212.
81
Chong, The Oriental Obscene, 215.
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Moving beyond Chong’s analysis of Bruce Lee and the movement-image, Lee’s presence
in cinema constructs a network of death and signification. The system of signs in this case does
not only refer to the visual language and phonic elements of the films, but signification is also
the way in which the films refer beyond themselves in both space and time. Within the films
themselves, there is always a connoted end of something, whether that be life in Fist of Fury or
freedom in Way of the Dragon when Tang Long is arrested. The notion of death or of an ending
is included most overtly in Game of Death. Game of Death’s title already points to the stakes of
the film, and it is as if death is always permeating the film. Furthermore, this film also links the
filmic death with the metafictional system of death and Bruce Lee. Game of Death was only
partially completed when Lee died. The film will always be incomplete, and it will remain the
film that is tied up with the memory of Lee’s real-life death. With this metafictional element,
Game of Death is a film that consolidates the system in which Lee’s films reach and point to
memories and temporalities beyond themselves.
Game of Death in many ways occupies an ambivalent space in terms of whether it can
really be considered Lee’s work, and audiences consider Game of Death as having two versions.
The first version is the one that is incomplete, consisting mainly of footage rather than a
complete narrative film that began filming in 1972. Although Lee is credited as the director, his
death prevented him from completing the film in his own vision. It was also picked up by Robert
Clouse in order to bring a complete film to audiences after Lee’s death. Clouse had previously
worked with Lee in Enter the Dragon, a co-produced work between Hong Kong and the United
States in the early 1970s, and Enter the Dragon was released only a few days after Lee’s death.
With his involvement in Enter the Dragon, Golden Harvest brought Clouse in to complete Game
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of Death. Although Lee had already completed some footage for Game of Death, shooting for
the film had yet to be completed. The footage of Lee in the film, therefore, is not as extensive
and is highly manipulated. The film uses the footage Lee had already previously shot, but also
included scenes that Lee himself did not shoot. Most notably, Game of Death uses two stand-
ins for Lee to construct more action scenes. This version was released in 1978 and includes a
completely new plot and characters. For example, in Game of Death, Lee’s character is named
Hai Tien, but in this second version of the film Lee’s character is named Billy Lo. This 1978
version also uses archival footage of Lee rather than relying on the footage Lee already shot for
the 1972 version. In fact, Clouse’s version only includes a little over eleven minutes of Lee’s
footage from Game of Death. The rest of the film is supplemented by previous archival footage
that Lee shot before Enter the Dragon, news footage from Lee’s televised funeral, and stand-in
actors masquerading as Lee.
Game of Death, therefore, occupies an ambivalent space in terms of being credited to
Lee as his own film. Clouse’s version claims to star Lee and credit is given to Lee in the credits
sequence. There are, however, obvious differences between what Lee had intended to be
Game of Death and what eventually was released as Game of Death in 1978. From the Lee
stand-ins and the manipulation of footage, the lack of Lee in the film is difficult to ignore. The
two versions were also given the same title as if to make them one film or at least more difficult
for the audience to discern Lee’s involvement in the 1978 version. This ambivalence
surrounding Lee’s participation is part of the marketing of the film. One likely reason for trying
to complete the film was for Golden Harvest to continue to profit from Lee’s image. The lack of
Lee’s own footage in the 1978 version also highlights this question of Lee’s authorship in the
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making of this film.
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Game of Death is both Lee’s film and not Lee’s film. Lee is present, but the
presence of stand-ins makes him visibly absent. Stand-ins would not be needed if Lee were
alive, and so they, instead, highlight his absence from the 1978 Game of Death.
A commonality for Game of Death in both iterations is the fact that they always point to
spaces and temporalities beyond themselves. The duality of these two films already cause a
feedback loop where one will always refer to another. The incomplete Game of Death
necessitates the 1978 version, and Clouse’s version would not have existed if not for the
incompleteness of the original. Both films refer to Lee’s characters, but they also constantly
point to Lee’s death outside of the films in that his death is the cause of incompletion and the
impetus for Clouse’s film. While Lee’s death is a direct cause for the first version of the film,
Golden Harvest’s film includes images from Lee’s funeral that are accounted for in the
narrative. The new character Clouse created out of Lee’s images and person, Billy Lo, faked his
death in the film. This “fake” death uses images from Lee’s real death. Clouse’s film, therefore,
compresses the temporality of death that can only be made possible by cinema. The film shows
Lee as dead, alive, and neither dead nor alive. Unlike Lee’s other films where they can stay
relatively contained within their own narrative, this manipulation of temporality makes the film
more ambivalent in its signification.
The presence of two films that refer to each other and how they also point to Lee’s life
and death also manipulates the sense of bodily presence. Particularly, the presence of Bruce
Lee clones reconfigures the martial artist’s corporeality. In his previous films, Lee only has one

82
The Lee’s actual footage is included in a Japanese documentary called, Bruce Lee in GOD directed by Toshizaku
Ohgushi. This has all the available footage Lee had shot before his death.
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body, his own. There are no stunt doubles nor separate performers for Lee. In fact, Lee is
known for not only choreographing his fight scene but also performing his own martial arts
sequences that attest to his skills as a martial artist outside of the films. This shifts with Game of
Death and its two versions. With his own incomplete version, Lee’s presence is consistently
singular. Quite literally, he is himself. In Clouse’s version, Lee is transformed into a montage of
different elements. Lee’s body is not limited to the filmic presence that was shot for Game of
Death. Rather, the film collages Lee with archival footage from his training, some scenes from
his version of Game of Death, and a series of stunt men and doubles that stood in for Lee in
new scenes. These doubles are not Lee, but in the film, they embody his presence. They
masquerade as him with the camera’s cooperation. These doubles move ambiguously in that
they are not their own characters in the film. Their presence is also a paradoxical one in terms
of relating to Bruce Lee’s body. Their bodies highlight the absence of his, but these doubles’
bodies become Lee’s bodies. It is as if Lee comes to possess them, and they double the
corporeality of his body. There is no longer one Bruce Lee, but many Bruce Lees. His singular
body multiplies and is duplicated through the presence of the doubles.
Considering the presence of the multiple doubles, the version of Game of Death that
was released in 1978 not only refers to its incomplete predecessor film and to Lee’s legacy, but
it also moves towards Bruceploitation. Bruceploitation mainly relies on the replication of Lee’s
image and body, and here, the body that is copied is a body that is not always static but made
up of a series of styles and actions. The form that Bruceploitation takes, however, is also not a
unified image or even genre of Lee or his films. Bruceploitation includes low-budget films that
have Bruce Lee clones, unofficial documentaries, and films that even vaguely cite Lee’s figure as
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influences or include Lee or his clones as ghostly presences. Some films have even included
Bruce Lee cyborgs as an homage to Lee’s iconicity. This phenomenon reached a boiling point in
the late 1970s through the 1980s in various film circuits. They did not always come from one
place and instead were made by various film industries. I have argued elsewhere that the image
of Bruce Lee and Bruceploitation even continued into the 2000s in the PRC with its remake of a
Bruce Lee television series, The Legend of Bruce Lee (2008) This series starred a Hong Kong
actor, Danny Chan Kwok-kwan, who came to fame for his resemblance to Lee. Aside from this
actor, other clones named Dragon Lee, Bruce Le, or Bruce Li among other names that played on
Bruce Lee’s name exploded onto the scene in the Bruceploitation heyday. These clones starred
in films like The Dragon Lives Again (1977) and The True Game of Death (1981), and over
twenty Bruceploitation films were released. Many times, these replicas of Lee and his films also
earned their own titles and stardom through their replication of Lee’s persona.
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Bruceploitation is a phenomenon that has taken on numerous manifestations. How
does Bruceploitation factor into our consideration of Bruce Lee’s relationship with language
and the body? The replication of Bruce Lee’s image and persona draws on the notion of his
death and both ephemeral and eternal presence. Through these clones, he is able to survive his
own death, but this survival is only partial because it also draws attention to his actual death.
His body is able to live on through the possession of these clones, but it is never his own body.
His corpse cannot defy death and does not have an afterlife, but his bodily presence through
the clones’ replication of his actions and his style persists. His clones take on specific Bruce Lee-
like affectations. They wear his yellow tracksuit, dark aviators, or have the Bruce Lee haircut,

83
Brian Hu, “’Bruce Lee’ after Bruce Lee: A life in conjectures,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no.2 (2008): 123-135.
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and sometimes they perform in numerous ways that hark back to martial artist. Their physical
look and performance, however, will always remain partial. None of them look exactly like Lee,
and it is obvious that they are simply other people who try to embody Lee’s persona. Their
Bruce Lee performance, however, creates a network and expectation of how Lee is supposed to
look and act. Particularly, with his physical looks and body, these clones, through their
repetitive actions and replications, reinforce Lee’s corporeality. This corporeality is not Lee’s
actual physical body, but it consists of the ways in which his body’s image and memory are
made. The clones are the elements that make up Lee’s style and body, each one incomplete
and partial. They each contribute to the memory and representation of Lee’s person and
legacy. His body, therefore, as a corporeality rather than a physicality is able to live on albeit
through another’s physical body. Bruceploitation clones map the ways in which his corporeality
and formed after his death.
The Bruce Lee bodies that Bruceploitation produces and Lee’s legacy are also directly
connected to how these bodies articulate language. Bruce Lee clones are not uniform in any
way. They take on different aspects based on the demands of the film, and this lack of
uniformity works on the level of signification as visual representation and as spoken language.
The clones do not have a single language. For example, in The True Game of Death,
Bruceploitation is the central driving impetus within the film. They not only use Bruce Lee’s
figure with the haircut and the yellow tracksuit, cast an actor named Hsiao Lung (which is
another spelling for Bruce Lee’s Chinese name), but also recreate the pagoda battle scene from
Game of Death with this new actor. The film also uses the practice of dubbing continues as if
they are Lee’s own films. The characters visibly speak in the film, but the speech and image do
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not match. Although the clone talent and film may have a preferred language, such as
Mandarin or English in the case of The True Game of Death, the film does not have a singular
language. There are always options for dubbing. The clones, therefore, have no spoken
language at all and rely on dubbing, which can be any language.
Without a spoken language, the clones also are dependent on their bodies to speak for
them. With spoken language foreclosed as a way for the clones to express themselves as a style
of Bruce Lee-ness, the visual network of representation is at the forefront of expression. Their
bodies must speak of, like, and about Bruce Lee in their various narrative plots. In
Bruceploitation films where there is more than one Bruce Lee clone, such as The Clones of
Bruce Lee, the clones take on specific visual signifiers that are supposed to represent Bruce
Lee’s likeness. In The Clones of Bruce Lee, which stars Bruce Le, Dragon Lee, and Bruce Lai, the
clones don Lee’s 1970s black aviators. The film focused on a “real” Bruce Lee destroying his
clones. They also imitate Lee’s haircut. It is part of the costume they put on, but it also serves to
consolidate their relationship to Lee. These visual signifiers work within a realm of
representation that points to Lee’s life and death and make it so that they can be removed from
their contexts and superimposed onto other bodies. The glasses cover up half of their faces,
and these sunglasses act as a mask. In this case, these physical affectations function like a death
mask. They are taken from Lee’s likeness so that he can be identified after his death. When the
clones wear this mask, they cover up their own identities and exchange it for a version of Bruce
Lee. Although it is very apparent that they are not Bruce Lee even when they do have these
physical affectations, they are bodies that speak of and like Lee.
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This system of visual signification that the clones take up for Lee’s corporeal presence to
defy death is not only limited to the physical characteristics of Lee’s body, but it is also
constructed through the performance of movements associated with Bruce Lee’s martial arts.
For example, In True Game of Death, the format of the fight scenes sought to replicate the
action in the archival footage of Game of Death. The body of the clone follows the action of Lee
in the film. The clone acts like Bruce Lee in a physical way beyond his appearance. More
broadly, the clones in other films refract an image of Bruce Lee through the ways in which they
take on this movement. Many of the clones perform martial arts in the films that resemble
Lee’s style of utilitarian movements that are not as flashy or flourishing as the swordplay films.
Because Lee’s martial arts philosophy was one that emphasized utility and fluidity, all martial
arts performances that prove to be effective and lack a structured style could be considered
Jeet Kune Do. They also mimic minor movements that have become iconic of Lee, such as
brushing the nose with his thumb, bouncing on the balls of his feet with his hands guarding his
face and chest, and provoking his enemies with his palm facing up. These small movements
became recognizably Bruce Lee’s when Lee performs them in his films, and they are further
reinforced as such when the clones copy them as part of their performance of Lee. As a result,
they make Bruce Lee into a language system that is wordless. It consists purely of visual
signifiers that cue viewers in about Bruce Lee’s presence through the clones.
The language of Bruce Lee is simultaneously an absence and presence. In his films and
with the Bruceploitation clones, they are refused their own language through the practice of
dubbing and subtitling. As a result, an alternative language is formed through Lee’s death and
legacy. Although Bruce Lee died in the 1970s, his memory and representation has been kept
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alive and well by Bruce Lee clones. The Bruceploitation phenomenon highlights Lee’s
corporeality and asserts his bodily presence without his physical body. The Bruce Lee clones
and imitators of Lee perform Lee’s identity in various ways and make it so that his corporeality
can survive its own death. Their repeated performance and citation of Lee’s style turns Lee into
a visual language system, a visuality that consists of a network of visual signifiers, when spoken
language is made unavailable. With this visuality, they make the dead speak a partial speech.
Movement and bodily representation become speech as they perform like and as Bruce Lee.
They move his persona into the realm of identity. This identity is performed, and this feedback
loop of a visual language continues to perpetuate itself through the constant mimicry and
repetition of Bruce Lee likeness. This bodily speech from beyond the grave into the present
allows for a representation of Lee to defy death and continue to speak through the bodies of
others.
How does death in cinema relate to language and the phonicity of an image? Here, I
turn back to Fred Moten’s work in relation to the discussion of visuality and the phonic image.
The language of Bruce Lee is a visual one, but this visuality and corporeal presence are not
strictly limited to sight and networks of visual meaning. These visual images and movements,
along with their extended meaning about Bruce Lee’s life and death, evoke a phonic element.
This phonicity is not a spoken language as language is foreclosed to both Lee and his clones, but
like the final image in Fist of Fury, it is the visceral scream. Unlike Fist of Fury, however, this
scream does not actually emerge from the still filmic image on the soundtrack. It is that the
memory of Bruce Lee repeated by the clones has the phonic element that keeps Lee’s
corporeality alive.
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As the phonic element of Bruce Lee’s moving pictures, the scream is not repeated in the
same way as the visual cues to the representations of Lee. It is Lee’s performance of the scream
in his films whilst engaging in martial arts movements that the scream becomes associated with
his body’s language. Through this repeated performance in his film, it becomes inseparable
from his visual system of signification. The clones also scream in similar ways in some cases. For
example, in the clones of Bruce Lee, the montage of the clones performing martial arts always
includes a Bruce Lee-esque grunt or scream. Sound is inextricable from Lee’s image, and this
connection is reinforced by the repeated audiovisual movements of the clones. The images of
Bruce Lee speak for and about themselves and allow for his corporeal presence to survive
beyond his death though a perpetual and repeated cinematic presence.
The presence of the clones and the phenomenon of Bruceploitation have kept Lee’s image alive
despite the martial artist’s own untimely death. While cinema itself occupies an ambivalent
space between life and death, Lee’s moving image further complicates that relationship. The
cinematic and photographic images of Lee do not simply mark the end of a moment, his death
on screen. They force him to survive his own death. Cinema is as much about survival as it is
about life, death, representation, and memory. In the case of Bruce Lee, survival has been co-
opted and perpetuated by these clones. They are the feedback loop in which Bruce Lee’s image
plays and replays. Through this repetition, sound and image merge, but it is not a sound that is
soundtrack. It is the scream, not language, that becomes the phonic substance of the image.
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IV. Dissonances: Multiple Voices and the Obstruction of Bodies in
Wong Kar Wai’s Martial Arts Films
New waves rolled through French cinema with directors such as Francois Truffant, Alain
Resnais, and Jean Luc-Godard.
84
In Asia, Japanese New Wave cinema with directors like
Imamura Shohei and Nagisa Oshima dealt with the aftermath of the second world war and
other social subjects, such as political radicalism, sexual violence, and ethnic discrimination
among others.
85
While these film movements have different histories and cultural contexts,
what draws them together is the self-conscious break these directors take with “old” cinema. In
Hong Kong, Wong Kar-Wai, Ann Hui, and Tsui Hark among others, came to represent the New
Wave in 1980s and 1990s. Wong, in particular, gained traction as an internationally viable
auteur director.
86
As Gina Marchetti points out, the notion of the new wave in cinema is not
particularly new. Marchetti writes, “ ‘[N]ew’ cinemas of various types do seem to follow
particular patterns...They self-consciously break with the old... Rather than apprenticing with
the old “masters” of the previous generation, they learn the filmmaking craft as university
students, critics, journalists, amateur short filmmakers, or through work in another medium like
television.”
87
At the time of their filmmaking, these directors were untraditional in not only how
they came to work with cinema but also the subject they wished to depict. New waves

84
Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham, eds., The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, (London: Palgrave
Macmillan / British Film Institute, 2009).
85
David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988).
86
Wai-ping Yau, “Wong Kar-wai, Auteur and Adaptor: Ashes of Time and In the Mood for Love,” in A Companion to
Wong Kar-wai, ed. Martha P. Nochimson (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 540-56.
87
Gina Marchetti, “The Hong Kong New Wave,” in A Companion to Chinese Cinema, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 95-96.
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consciously broke with older models of filmmaking while addressing their contemporary
concerns about society.
The Hong Kong New Wave’s first signs of movement emerged with Tang Shu-shuen’s
The Arch (1970). Tang also began a Hong Kong cinema publication called Close-Up, but it was
not until it became the Hong Kong Film Bi-Weekly that the Hong Kong New Wave was firmly
grounded in the 1970s similar with Cahiers Du Cinema and the French New Wave. Hong Kong’s
emphasis on the local and political context, however, provided a different sort of fertile ground
for younger filmmakers. Hong Kong’s status as a British colony and its impending handover in
1997 to the PRC fueled a sense of estrangement. Esther Cheung explains that Hong Kong New
Wave cinema depicted the precarious status of the city, but the second wave of New Wave
directors like Wong also portrayed “a sense of uprootedness in a global city and the crisis of the
1997 handover.”
88
The directors dealt with the local and its concerns, used Cantonese and
highlighted multilingualism, and addressed turbulent political conditions.
89

While Wong and his fellow New Wave directors were and are a prolific bunch, this
chapter will focus on Wong’s Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster, his only two martial arts
films to date. Yet, Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster differ greatly. At the same time, they
navigate the problems of verbal and bodily communication in nuanced ways. Stylistically, these
two films are vastly disparate, but they each comment on how the body moves and speaks in
non-verbal ways. In other words, visual and bodily communication is at the center of these

88
Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and See Kam Tan, eds., Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to
the Digital Frontier (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), p.17.
89
Rey Chow, “Nostalgia of the New Wave: Structure in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together,” Camera Obscura 42
(1999): 30-49.
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films, especially with the historical and political changes Hong Kong underwent throughout the
1990s and into the contemporary period.
Wong has garnered international fame and recognition, and award-winning directors,
such as Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight (2016), have discussed how they have been
influenced by Wong. Wong began in television with series work at Television Broadcast Limited
(TVB). His directorial debut, As Tears Go By (1988) starred Jacky Cheung, Maggie Cheung, and
Andy Lau as the main characters and enjoyed much success due to the Hong Kong popstar cast.
The same cast, with the addition of Leslie Cheung, joined Wong for his second feature, Days of
Being Wild (1990). Wong also worked numerous times with Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Ziyi, Tony
Leung Ka-fai, and Brigitte Lin. Many of the same cast members continued with Wong on his
auteur journey in films like Chungking Express (1994), Ashes of Time (1994), Fallen Angels
(1995), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004).
90
Among these
films, Happy Together, which focuses on a turbulent gay couple from Hong Kong living in
Argentina, won Best Director at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Wong also received Best
Director for Days of Being Wild at the Golden Horse Film Festival in 1994 and has also been
nominated and won numerous awards at the Hong Kong Film Awards.
After My Blueberry Nights in 2007, Wong delved into the biopic with The Grandmaster
released in 2013.
91
Unlike his previous films that were based on works of fiction, The
Grandmaster focuses on the life of Yip Man, who is more widely known as Bruce Lee’s Wing
Chun teacher and a legendary martial artist in his own right. The film begins with the impending

90
Peter Brunette, Wong Kar-wai (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
91
Ken Provencher, “Transnational Wong,” in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, ed. Martha P. Nochismson (Hoboken:
John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 23-46.
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second Sino-Japanese war in the background, as the narrative follows the life of Yip Man,
played by Tony Leung, who is chosen to represent Southern Style martial arts, in a main conflict
with Gong Yutian, played by Wang Qingxiang, a martial artist from northern china, where the
superiority of the masters and their associated regions and styles comes head to head.
Eventually, due to escalating violence in China, Yip Man moves to Hong Kong from Foshan,
where he sets up his own martial arts school. The film ends by blending archival images of Yip
Man with his fictionalized incarnation and hints towards a future with a picture of Yip Man with
Bruce Lee by explicitly pointing out that the young man in the photo is indeed Lee.
The Grandmaster, however, is not Wong’s first foray into the martial arts genre. In 1994,
Wong released Ashes of Time, which was loosely inspired by the Jin Yong novel, The Legend of
the Condor Heroes. The film focuses on Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), Murong Yang and Yin
(Brigitte Lin), Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), and Hong Qigong (Jacky Cheung). The film also
features Tony Leung Chiu-Wai as a blind swordsman and Maggie Cheung as Ouyang Feng’s
sister-in-law. While all their stories intersect through different meetings and battles, each
narrative is told in a compartmentalized, episodic way with Ouyang Feng as the central
narrator. For example, the story of Murong Yang and Yin is told to the audience through an
extended flashback. Ouyang Feng relays the story of a pair of twins, who are the same person.
One is a man, Murong Yang, and the “twin” is a woman, Murong Yin. Murong Yang attempts to
hire Ouyang Feng to assassinate Huang Yaoshi because Huang has slighted Murong Yin. The
female “twin” wavers on her decision to kill Huang, and eventually, the twins leave. The
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audience then sees a swordsman, Murong Yang and Yin. This is but one narrative in the
extremely complex film, which was re-cut and re-released in 2008 as Ashes of Time Redux.
92

As films that at least tangentially touch the genre of martial arts, both Ashes of Time and
The Grandmaster highlight the presence of the body. While these films have been discussed in
terms of their relation to Wong’s auteur status, these two films, however, present a heightened
awareness of the body in the Sinophone sphere due to their intersection with Hong Kong’s film
industry and its involvement with ideas of China and Chineseness.
93
Ashes of Time was released
in a post-1984 Sino-British Declaration phase and is situated as part of the New Wave, but The
Grandmaster’s historical context is markedly different in that it is a post-handover film made to
appease audiences from not only Hong Kong and abroad but to also boost ticket sales in the
People’s Republic of China. With these differences of production and target audience, the
representation of the body shifts as well. While both films attempt to construct and represent
Sinophone bodies, or bodies in Sinophone contexts, the audiences to which they speak varies
greatly. Cinema’s depiction of Sinophone bodies must grapple with key questions about
audiences, political shifts, and shared visual and aural language. What are the implications of
the possible existence of a Sinophone body? Does the multiplicity of bodies shift with changing
politics in specific regions, such as Hong Kong or the PRC? How has this imagined Sinophone
body shifted and changed over time, and what are the implications of such a change?

92
Roger Ebert, “Ashes of Time Redux,” Roger Ebert, November 11, 2008, accessed December 20, 2018,
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ashes-of-time-redux-2008.
93
Stephen Teo, “Wong Kar-wai’s Genre Practice and Romantic Authorship: The Cases of Ashes in Time Redux and
The Grandmaster,” in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, ed. Martha P. Nochismson (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons,
2016), 522-539.
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The conception of a Sinophone body is inextricably tied to the politics of the Sinophone.
And so, Sinophone studies needs to consider the question of the body and its relation to
language in the periods of political and cultural transition. Through an analysis of Wong’s
martial arts genre films that highlight the body’s visibility and obstructed imaginaries, the films
offer a version of language that is embodied and networked into a visuality of Chineseness.
While language as spoken or written and the body itself are mutually exclusive entities, the
body in fields of vision situated in local contexts can reveal, obscure, and reconfigure the signs
associated with language. Locally situated bodies in the Sinophone context transform written
and spoken signifiers to movement as signifier. Language is understood as a set of spoken or
written signs, but in this case, it refers to a wider set of modes of signification: it is language as
style, as form. Throughout Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster, the martial movement by both
sides represents a visuality that embodies specific affiliations to the north or to the south, and
in a violent, physical encounter, there is action, movement as utterance, as well as a display of a
character's response-ability to that action. Martial movement, the body in the process of
martial arts, is not a negation of signs but a reconfiguration of such signs, and language
becomes a kind of verticality, a vertex where meaning and form collide, where the Sinophone is
not simply uttered in speech but through movement.
This chapter first examines The Grandmaster and the context that surrounded its
production focusing on the making of different versions and their distinct subtitling. This
practice resonates with the different dubbing tracks in Bruce Lee’s films in that they allow the
films to circulate to different audiences. I mainly discuss the language tracks of the films rather
than the overall soundtrack, which includes the various songs and non-diagetic sounds of the
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film.
94
While there is a sense of disruption whether it is with dubbing, subtitling, or multiple
versions, I argue that this disruption is a visual dissonance that provokes the audience to
recognize the difference that masquerades as a form of seamless communication. The second
part of this chapter looks at how bodies on screen are obstructed from view in their stylistic
imaginings in Ashes of Time. The 1994 film and its recut 2008 version also suggest the possibility
of being multiple films albeit with different circumstances than The Grandmaster. At the same
time, the re-releasing of Ashes of Time points to the relevance of the film in a post-handover
era as well. I explore the ways in which both versions of Ashes of Time visually obscure bodies
and make them opaque to the viewer. Opacity here is not about seeing through in a literal
sense, but it marks how we read the image. Bodies are present in martial arts movement, but
they cannot be read. This illegibility of the images on screen obstructs viewing practices.
The driving argument of the chapter rests in the dissonance of language and disruption
in the visual as productive practice. Dissonance already implies that there is a lack of harmony,
a cacophony of sounds that irks the ear. It strikes the listener as strange, odd, or unpleasant.
Disruption is even stronger in its implications. It does not only describe a phenomenon but an
affective reaction. To disrupt is to be shaken to the core and to have one’s sensibilities riled out
of place and jolted out of one’s homeostasis. Disruptions disturb our normalized senses of place
and being. Dissonance disrupts our expectations of sound. The practices of dissonance and

94
For an analysis of soundtracks and music in Wong Kar-wai’s films see Giorgio Biancorossa, “The Value of Re-
exports: Wong Kar-wai’s Use of Pre-existing Soundtracks,” in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, ed. Martha P.
Nochimson (John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 182-205; Ludmila Moreira Macedo de Carvalho, “Memories of Sound and
Light: Musical Discourse in the Films of Wong Kar-wai,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 3 (November 2008): 197-
210.; and Emily Yueh-yu Yeh, “A Life of Its Own: Musical Discourses in Wong Kar-Wai’s Films,” Post Script: Essays in
Film and the Humanities 19, 1 (Fall 1999); and Emily Yueh-yu Yeh and Lake Wang Hu, “Transcultural Sounds: Music,
Identity, and the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai,” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2009): 32-46.
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disruption push us out of place through differences in senses and sensations. In other words,
dissonance and visual disruption orient us away from the normal and from normalization.
Working from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which focuses on “orient” as a verb,
the orientation of one’s sexuality, and the “orient” in orientalism, Ahmed explores how bodies
react within specific contexts and representations.
95
This queering of orientedness is a practice
that is productive in shaking up our senses of identity not only for sexualities and otherness, but
it also addresses the work of disrupting normalized ethno-cultural identities as well. I argue that
this jolting is not about a disruption that leaves ruins in its wake, but disruptions and
dissonances are productive practices precisely because they can re-orient identities. They make
space rather than ruin, but it is under the guise of ruin that space is created. The illegibility of
images, aural dissonances, and visual disruptions of Wong’s films seem to break down and
disrupt, but it is the act of disrupting structures itself that is a productive practice.

An Imagination of Seamless Communication: Multiples as Sinophonic Practice
Wong’s films have been extensively studied, and multiple approaches have been used to
examine his films. Some scholars have emphasized his global and local appeal, and others have
attempted to produce genealogies of his work. In this section, I examine the politics of Wong’s
film, The Grandmaster. When this film was released, there were multiple versions that had
different language tracks. Each of these language tracks has its own politics at play. Some
scholars have said, “Wong is primarily interested in evoking the poetry of movement and the

95
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, (Durham: Duke University Press Books,
2006), 25.
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process by which history becomes myth…Wong is unconcerned with the veracity of his
historical narrative.”
96
This point is contentious because it argues that Wong’s work is devoid of
political impetus and favors poetry and artistry above all else. Ultimately, this point of view
disregards the politics of history, but in fact, history and language are intertwined in The
Grandmaster in political ways.
Sebastian Nestler’s work on Wong illustrates the importance of language politics in his
films. Working from David Bordwell’s “avant-pop cinema” and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of
minor literature, Nestler argues that Wong’s films are “minor movies.”
97
He says,
“ Understood as minor literature the work of Wong Kar-wai exists in a state of continuous
transformation and ‘becoming’.”
98
More importantly, Nestler points out, “Thus, the concept of
minor literature essentially addresses the dichotomy of majority and minority…a minor
literature is always political and collective. It is the constant companion of major languages,
because every language implies its own deterritorialisation.”
99
Indeed, Wong’s films function as
a language of their own that negotiates with hegemonic norms and power rather than
attempting to completely overturn hegemony. The use of language in the article speaks of
language in abstracted ways and towards a filmic form or film language, mainly of Hollywood.
Deleuze and Guattari’s work, however, also focuses on quite literally the language used in Franz
Kafka’s work. Speaking of Kafka, they say, “He will opt for the German language of Prague as it
is and in its very poverty. Go always farther in the direction of deterritorialization to the point

96
Nicholas Godfrey, “Years of Being Styled Wong Kar Wai’s Many Grandmasters,” Metro Magazine 183, (Summer
2015): 65.
97
Sebastian Nestler, “Minor Movies: On the Deterritorializing Power of Wong Kar-wai’s Works,” Frontier of Literary
Studies in China 6, no.4 (2012): 584.
98
Nestler, Minor Movies, 585.
99
Nestler, Minor Movies, 586.
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of sobriety.”
100
With Kafka, Prague’s German plays a critical role in the process of
deterritorialization in order for us to consider the notion of a minor literature. Thus, the
language used in Wong’s films cannot be limited to the major language of Hollywood. It is,
therefore, necessary to examine the languages used in Wong’s films from Hong Kong
Cantonese to Beijing Mandarin. They each have their own set of politics that comment on
center-periphery interactions.
The Grandmaster poses a set of complex regional dynamics that traverses mainland
China and Hong Kong. From the different versions of the film with their various intended
audiences to the regionality represented within the film itself, the universe that is presented to
the viewer is one that seems to be unified, but riptides of difference lie beneath the surface.
These differences manifest themselves in subtle ways, but they are nonetheless present, and, in
a myriad of ways, they disrupt the viewing experience. Such disruptions exemplify the
“multiples” of a Sinophonic practice. I choose the word multiples in that it connotes a sense of
potential exponential growth. Whereas words like multiplicity imply a kind of numerousness, it
is relatively static in its meaning. Multiples are a result of multiplication, an action that forces
an outcome.
101
Multiplication in arithmetic is not simply adding but it is exponential addition
where the result is significantly greater than the original. In other words, multiples imply active
rather than static growth in increments of greater number. Multiples allow for a variety of
orientations and are conduits for turning towards and away from all directions possible.

100
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press), 19.
101
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 8.
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Multiples are manifest in the various versions of The Grandmaster. There is no original
version of the film, but there are multiples. While the Hong Kong version may seem like the
likeliest candidate as the original, it is but one version that is speculated to be the original. The
Grandmaster has been identified as a Hong Kong film from the fact that it was the Hong Kong
entry for the Foreign Language Category for the 2014 Oscars.
102
It was also nominated for Best
Cinematography as well with Philippe Le Sourd at the helm, and William Chang Suk Ping was
nominated for Best Costume Design.
103
The nature of co-production, however, prevents any
version from being the original. They are all versions of the same footage produced by various
networks of cooperation. The Grandmaster was a co-produced film between Hong Kong and
China. Already, one of the vested interests is the People’s Republic, or at least production
companies in the People’s Republic. The structure of the co-production resists the formation of
hierarchies around an original. These different versions, rather, are interconnected through
various aspects of the film, such as shared footage and credits among other things, each with its
own orientation and structural considerations.
Such structural considerations are represented in the differences of each version. There
are three versions of the film that reformulate the story of Yip Man. There is the domestic
Chinese version, the Berlin International Film Festival version, and United States (also known as
the international) version. These versions vary in length and in terms of how much they include
in the cut. For example, the domestic Chinese version is the longest and the international

102
Karen Chu, “Oscars: Hong Kong Nominates Wong Kar Wai’s ‘The Grandmaster’ for Foreign Language Category,”
The Hollywood Reporter, September 23, 2013, accessed December 20, 2018,
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/oscars-hong-kong-nominates-wong-634287.
103
Peter Knegt, “2014 Oscar Predictions: Best Cinematography,” Indiewire, February 9, 2013, accessed December
20, 2018, http://www.indiewire.com/2014/02/2014-oscar-predictions-best-cinematography-30176/.
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version is the shortest.
104
The issue of these different versions have been critiqued by various
viewers, and a review in the New York Times pointed out, “Although these changes are said to
have been approved by Mr. Wong (consent that may have more to do with contractual
obligations than happy compromises), it’s too bad that the American distributor didn’t have
enough faith in the audience to release the original.”
105
Wong has also addressed the cutting
and tightening of the American version, “ All that being said, I was never interested in telling a
watered down version of THE GRANDMASTER in the U.S., or just trimming to cut back minutes
— it had to be a creative, sharp and honed vision,” and “Ultimately, I worked to envision the
most perfect clock or the essence of martial arts itself; it is all about precision and balance.”
106

While these different versions are relevant in their networking of the film, this is not the
only way in which we can divide and categorize the different versions. In fact, more versions of
the film exist. They vary in how the film is languaged. At times, such languaging may overlap
with the different versions, such as the intertitles between cuts in the American version. At
other times, the differentiation does not go deep enough. The languages of the film differ
greatly, and each language is oriented in a multiple of ways.
In addition to a division by geographic audience, I propose a proliferation of strains that
sprouts from the differences in language and practices of languaging in each version. Each

104
Andrew Daley, “The Grandmaster- a Comparison of Cuts,” Eastern Kicks, December 1, 2014, accessed December
20, 2018, https://www.easternkicks.com/news/the-grandmaster-a-comparison-of-cuts.
105
Manohla Dargis, “Style and Kinetics Triumph in a Turbulent China,” The New York Times, August 22, 2013,
accessed December 21, 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/movies/the-grandmaster-wong-kar-wais-
new-film.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1381852592-
89xdTl2hBG1hx8f/eoSZCg&pagewanted=1&&pagewanted=all.
106
Wong Kar Wai, “The Journey of The Grandmaster,” The Huffington Post (blog), October 22, 2013, accessed
December 19, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/wong-kar-wai/the-grandmaster-wong-kar-
wai_b_3796335.html.
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version has varying ways in which language is presented, whether it is visual or spoken
language. The Hong Kong version of the film features a multilingual language track, which
emphasizes linguistic dissonance. This version of the film features linguistic disparities as one
element that disrupts the viewer. For example, Yip Man speaks a Hong Kong-accented
Cantonese throughout the film. Yet, he can have a seamless conversation with characters who
exclusively speak Mandarin. When Yip Man converses with Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), who speaks
Mandarin with a Beijing accent, their dialogue has seemingly fluid communicative results in the
diegesis of the film. This fluidity in their communication offers a seamless linguistic landscape in
that the characters seem to be able to communicate as if these differences were not there.
107

This fluidly communicative universe is that it is nearly impossible outside of the film,
especially when considering the spoken languages at play. Mandarin and Cantonese, regardless
of their accents, are mutually unintelligible languages. From their grammatical structures to the
ways in which a Sinitic character is pronounced, these two languages are unintelligible if the
speakers do not learn each other’s languages.
108
Despite the linguistic seamlessness that the
film poses in its dialogue, the fact remains that outside of the film these speakers of Cantonese
and Mandarin would not have such seamless communication. Audiences in-tune with this
difference are aware of this disparity, and it can be an aural distraction in the film.
This linguistic dissonance is because a result of the fact that the languages spoken are
not in-line with each other. As Olivia Khoo writes, “Language is destabilized as a unifying form

107
This is also the case in 2046, which includes Tony Leung speaking in Cantonese, Zhang Ziyi speaking in
Mandarin, and Kimura Takuya speaking in Japanese.
108
Jerry Norman, Chinese, (Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Norman
explains, ““A speaker of the Peking dialect can no more understand a person speaking Cantonese than an
Englishman can understand an Austrian when each employs his native language.” (2)
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of communication and community for Wong’s characters (and by extension, for the viewers of
his films.”
109
While Khoo addresses Wong’s overall oeuvre, the linguistic nuances of The
Grandmaster also reflect the ways in which the film orients itself rather than strictly thinking in
terms of uniform language. The characters in the film do not perform in the same language, but
the speakers continue a chain of communication and exchanges as if they were. As a result, the
orientation of this film is not only outwards towards the audience, but it folds inwards onto
itself creating its own self-contained world. This folding also cues in audiences who are in-tune
with these differences as a subset of the larger audiences to critically reflect on the structures
and practices of language. On the most superficial level, the film is geared towards a broad
audience in terms of its release and circulation. The linguistic dissonance, however, orients The
Grandmaster towards more specific sites. Audiences who are familiar with Sinitic languages are
able to hear the differences between the languages and accents used in the film. The
dissonance is perhaps most clearly heard by this group in that the differences between
Cantonese and Mandarin are starkly different. It is almost impossible to ignore such difference
because they are two different Sinitic languages. Furthermore, this dissonance is highlighted for
those familiar with both languages because of the fluid communication. Rather than
constructing a seamless universe with linguistic fluidity, the world constructed by the film is
brought into question. As a result, the outward orientation of The Grandmaster also produces a
critique of these specific languages for this audience. The difference is highlighted through the

109
Olivia Khoo, “Wong Kawaii: Pop Culture China and the Films of Wong Kar-wai,” The Journal of Popular Culture
47, no. 4 (2014), 733.
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seamlessness, and we are made even more aware of the differences between languages
categorized broadly as “Chinese.”
The film both reaches outwards and pushes inwards creating a web of orientations
without a center that contemplates the meaning and structures of language in the Sinophone
context. While the linguistic dissonance disturbs the film watching experience and throws a
wrench into the seamless world the film seems to create, the lack of overt acknowledgement of
difference in language insists on its own fluidity. Regional difference is expressed in the film,
but that is mainly tackled in the driving plot. Difference in language is not mentioned or is
purposefully elided to make it appear the characters are having communicative exchanges in
the same language. And so, while disturbing those outside the world of the film, from a self-
enclosed perspective it persists in creating a unified linguistic world despite the differences in
language. The film creates its own universal language that is only unified through difference. I
call this creation of a universal language within the film a folding into itself because it cannot be
projected outwards with any integrity in that the languages used are not mutually
understandable. It is only within itself that the linguistic exchanges hold communicative weight.
In other words, the languages used are imagined to be unified and mutually understandable
only within the world of the film, and this unification of languages instantiates a universal
language only within the filmic world itself. Therefore, the film’s languages branch inwards and
get tangled together, constructing a web of understanding within the world of the film.
The Grandmaster’s use of linguistic dissonance as a language track produces a critique
of structures of language to audiences tuned into difference but also creates an insistence on
its own language. While bilingual speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese exist, such fluid
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conversations where there is no linguistic hybridization and complete comprehension present a
world that is rigidly divided. The language produced, however, is one of inherent dissonance,
encapsulating the paradox of language and understanding where the languages are
unintelligible, but communication persists. This new language is not necessarily about sameness
as it is about seamlessness, but it highlights difference and critiques singular language. Here, I
emphasize production of the film in relation to language and linguistic dissonance. Difference
does not cause things in the film to fall apart; instead, it brings The Grandmaster together. The
use of different Sinitic languages and the audible linguistic difference produces a new language
of dissonance and distraction in the film while simultaneously insisting on a unified diegesis.
The orienting of the film inwards and outwards and the multiples of branches produce an
alternative to singular language. The productive practice of orienting allows the film to have
multiples of itself, each varying on its own take of linguistic difference. The film’s language is
never singular, but it is always multiple and producing various orients and understanding. At
the same time, the orientation of the film is not always liberatory from structures of hegemony.
The proliferation of branches can also feed into ideas about cohesion and cultural singularity.
Multiples are about openness to alternative understandings of language and identity but does
not foreclose the possibility of oppression and the erasure of difference.
The version of The Grandmaster where linguistic difference is elided is also productive,
but the sense of culture it produces is about erasure and invisibility. The Grandmaster also has a
dubbed track where all the characters who do not speak Mandarin are dubbed over by
Mandarin speakers. Actors such as Tony Leung Chiu-wai can also speak Mandarin, but they are
not used to dub over their own voices. Leung speaks Mandarin with a Cantonese accent, and it
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would be easy for Sinitic language speakers to spot the difference.
110
His Mandarin is not native
and accented. To prevent this difference, these actors are dubbed over by Mandarin voice
actors. In The Grandmaster, visual disturbance through dubbing recedes into the background
because it allows for the assertion of a cohesive aurality.
With the erasure of difference, the sense of aural cohesion and aurality constructs a
singularly sounded world. Difference is not heard, and any disparities that are seen are
overcome by the sound of the film. More importantly, this world is an orientation. This sense of
a shared spoken language and singular heard language presents a universal language that is not
only within the world of the film but aligns with that of Sinophone audiences as well. It is
asserting a universal language in lieu of difference rather than a supplement to difference or a
way to elucidate difference. This type of universalizing gesture moves the film towards a sense
of unity. It brings others under the umbrella of a shared language and forces them into a
community. The shared aurality orients towards collective cohesion and both ignores and
erases difference. Thus, rather than being a gesture to liberate, this orientation forces
hegemony onto the speaking subjects. It brings them back into authoritative structures so that
it can continue to exert its own power over their bodies and beings.
This orientation of the forced shared language moves in towards itself when it brings
subjects under its control, but its outwards gestures also orient the film towards an orientalism.
The shared aurality and spoken presence of the characters quite literally make them all sound
the same. Accents and other languages are omitted in favor of one language that overtakes the

110
Tony Leung Chiu-Wai can be seen speaking Cantonese accented Mandarin in numerous interview videos and in
feature length films, such as Lust, Caution (dir. Ang Lee,2007). His accent is easily detectable to Sinitic language
speakers.
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soundtrack of the film. This type of “sounding the same” is a reflection of sameness. It makes
those speaking the language converge as a group, and this convergence is then tasked to
portray itself to those outside. The representation in the film becomes a singularized entity to
an outsider, an other. Those in the film are made to become a solidified group, and they are
imagined as homogenous through their singular language. This orienting is a form of self-
orientalizing, a way to imagine the self as the other in relation to another group.
111
Orientalism
for Edward Said relies on how the “West” imagines the other as exotic. The Orient is
categorized as mysterious, despotic, and a relic of the past.
112
This other was constructed to
justify European imperialism and colonization. At the same time, those categorized as “the
orient” also participated in discourses of orientalism.
113

Language is also a key factor for the self-orientation of self-orientalism. It is a form of
consolidating the self that factors into the process of depicting the self as other. The use of a
single language forms what Benedict Anderson calls the imagined community.
114
While
Anderson argues for how print plays the key role, print is another form of language that is
single in its iteration. It is not a de-standardized language, but one that is single and works to
consolidate disparate groups. This form of language constructs the self, a group of the self that
is orientalizing in its underpinnings. The discourse of orientalism is one that also consolidates
and elides difference within the “other.” Orientalism seeks to make a group singular and easier
to stereotype, and therefore, it creates a justification to enslave entire populations regardless

111
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 109.
112
Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1979), 26.
113
Koichi Iwabuchi, “Complicit Exoticism: Japan and Its Other,” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media &
Culture 8, no. 2 (1994), 49-82.
114
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York:
Verso, 2006), 39.
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of differences within those communities. The dubbing in The Grandmaster, therefore, is an
orientation of the self, imagined as a monolith, as the orient. In other words, the dubbed film is
a practice of turning “Chinese” into a monolithic and monolingual orient. Other versions, such
as the multilingual version, can also self-orientalize due to an implicit establishing of a unified
communication through seamless speech acts. The dubbed version, however, also seeks to
establish a “Chinese” hegemony in the process of self-orientalization. Dubbing in Mandarin
orientalizes in its erasure of difference to exert power over the groups overtaken. It is not a
multilingual orientalism with an implicit shared understanding, but the dubbed film works to
eliminate difference and assert a singularized linguistic universe.
Self-orientalism is not a standalone concept, but it also works in service of discourses of
orientalism. The Grandmaster in other forms with its alternative versions can be read as
pushing audiences to confront their own orientalism. Here, I turn to visual dissonances. Despite
the attempt to have a seamless linguistic universe in the aural dimensions of the film, the visual
language and dynamics of languaging allow for the film to continue its proliferation of
branches. Although there is the self-orientalizing orientation and the possibility of reinforcing
hegemony, there are also other alternative orients reinforcing the idea of the multiples of
presences of the film.
The international version of the film has been severely criticized by reviewers because
this version is not simply different by virtue of the language track, but the film itself has been
significantly altered. The Hong Kong Oscar entry was shorter than the non-International
versions with certain scenes cut out because of time considerations. Some claimed that
because the international audience, or more specific the US audience, have shorter attention
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spans, the film was reduced in time to accommodate the attention deficit of these audiences.
Other critics also claimed that this shorter version was made more streamlined in terms of the
story so that people who have no knowledge of Chinese history could keep up with the story.
115

To address the historical context, intertitles were also introduced into the film in the
international version. These intertitles imply that the audience is unaware of the history and
context in which the film takes place. While this may be true for some audience members, it
assumes a certain type of essentialized difference that is orientalist in its undertones. The
history depicted in the film is assumed to be so removed from the audience members that the
viewers would need the film to literally spell out what is going on in the film. It assumes the
audience is not willing to fill in these gaps themselves but only willing to watch the film as the
historical lacunae are filled in for them because the cultural and historical backgrounds are so
different. In other words, there is an underlying prevalence of a sense of incommensurability
between the film and international viewers.
It would be overly simplistic to say that the international version of The Grandmaster is
simply a paired down orientalist vision of Chinese martial arts figures from the past, and the
various versions necessitate serious consideration.
116
In fact, the film in this version can be read
as a resistance to such a reading through the refusal of a seamless visuality that is projected to
audiences outside of the Sinophone world. The visual universe at first may seem cohesive

115
Tim Appelo, “Wong Kar Wai Says His 108-Minute ‘The Grandmaster’ Is Not ‘A Watered-Down Version,’” The
Hollywood Reporter, January 6, 2014, accessed December 17, 2018,
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/wong-kar-wai-says-his-668633.
116
Li Zhuotao 李焯桃, 《Yidai zongshi 》 san guo banben de yitong 《一代宗師》三國版本的異同 [“The
Grandmaster” The similarities and differences between three versions], in Wang Jiawei de yinghua shijie 王家衛的
映畫世界, Huang Ailing 黃愛玲, Pan Guoling 潘國靈, Li Zhaoxing 李照興 eds. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics
Society, 2015), 286-295.
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because of the various elements that make up the mise-en-scene. The actors and actresses
wear period costumes. The architecture, especially the brothel house, also appears to fit into
the visual world with its ornate finishings and dark ambience. In a fight scene between Gong Er
and Ma San, the two northern practitioners fight under the looming threat of Japanese
occupation. Ma San was Gong Yutian’s disciple. He betrays and kills his master and takes up
arms with the Japanese. To avenge her father, Gong Er sought out Ma San, and they fight in
front of a coal-powered train in the northern part of China that is covered with snow. These
elements work towards the construction of a dramatized universe that sets the film in an
imagined historical “China.”
Yet, this constructed world is not uninterrupted. The intertitles jerk the viewer out of
this universe and make them aware of filmic mediation while serving as an explanatory element
for those unaware with the historical context. On the other hand, they break up the visual
seamlessness. Their presence is a refusal of a visuality that consolidates a sense of the
orientalist imagination. The presence of intertitles disturbs the viewing process. The audience
cannot be fully absorbed by the world of the film, and they are forced to confront their outsider
position. The viewer must read for context, but this reading already assumes that they do not
readily have the knowledge of the historical context of the film. The intertitles also physically
break up The Grandmaster’s visual narrative. Rather than having a consolidated universe that
stands alone, Wong’s film interrupts and forces a visual dissonance onto the viewer. When we
expect the film to proceed in confirming the presence of a unified visual spectacle, The
Grandmaster shows us a black screen with smoky effects and text. These intertitles tell rather
than show, but they do show the audience a way to orient themselves in relation to the film.
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These intertitles direct the audience to read, to understand the historical context, and most
importantly, to reflect on their own positions as viewers of the film.
The multiple versions of the film including the multilingual, dubbed, and intertitled
version provide points of aural and visual dissonances in The Grandmaster. Such dissonances
make assumptions about viewers, disorient, and reorient viewers through their inconsistencies.
Moreover, they complicate a simplistic understanding of what constitutes authenticity in that
each version decenters the version before it. There is no authentic version of the film, but
rather multiple versions. The presence of these multiples move away from the notion of a
centrality and an authentic experience of the film because each orients in a different direction
and upturns our expectation of a singular film. In other words, rather than one The
Grandmaster, there are multiple The Grandmasters, and each has its own claim to be an
authentic film and viewing experience. Considering both the multiples and their dissonances, an
authentic image of Chineseness begins to break down into difference pieces with each piece
facing its own direction.

Broken Visualities
The different versions of The Grandmaster critique the politics of language and
authenticity. Rather than a singular language or film, there are multiples at play. At the same
time, the embodied visual languages on screen further enforce the sense of division and
multiple orientations of Chineseness. Namely, the martial arts styles used in the film exemplify
visualized difference. In this section, I closely analyze a fighting sequence from The
Grandmaster, and the version that I refer to is the multilingual version of the film. The
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multilingual track already features a dissonant aural landscape, and dissonances are highlighted
through embodied distinctions. Despite such dissonances, communication is still present. Here,
I posit the notion of fluid dissonance as shown by the ability for the characters to communicate
through their bodies even when spoken language is tenuous. Ultimately, I show how The
Grandmaster shows how regionalism is networked through the body and its performance of
language.
The broken seamless visual universe is also reinforced by the depiction of a regional
sensibility. The Grandmaster’s visuality addresses various orientations and branches out
through its languaging practice as well as its narrative elements. These two elements of the
film, language and narrative, also intersect most vividly in the multilingual version of the film.
The Grandmaster highlights the division of north and south. These are ambiguously defined
geographical regions, and the exact demarcation between north and south China has been at
times the Huai River. The division between the north and south can also be thought of
abstractly in that it can be marked by how individuals practice their own identities. The various
fighting scenes and their environments, such as snow in the north, has also inflected the
fighting systems that are depicted.
117
Such a division can be constituted through different
identifications and affiliations, such as language, rather than simply where one was born.
The north and south in The Grandmaster’s depiction is also about an alignment and
network of styles and spoken language. The arrangement of the narrative is centralized on the
division and the styles that are affiliated with them. Moreover, these two places are set up in a

117
Pao-Chen Tang, “The Grandmaster of Snow: Martial Arts, Particle Systems and the Animist Cinema,” Journal of
Chinese Cinemas 12, 1 (2018): 74-91.
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battle that is supposed to end with either the north or south coming out on top. Each
practitioner is a master of a certain style, and their language follows suite. For example, Yip
Man who practices Wing Chun, a style associated with the southern part of China, speaks
Cantonese. In contrast with the south, Gong Er, who is a master from the north, speaks
Mandarin. Within these characters there is an arrangement of styles lining up with their
language, but because of the multilingual landscape of the film, they provide a linguistic
dissonance overall through their fluid communication. Regional identities are highlighted as
ways in which bodies are networked.
This fluid dissonance is perhaps seen most clearly through the process of learning about
different styles. Language is understood as a set of shared spoken or written set of signs, but in
this case, language refers to not such a narrow set of forms or signification. It is language as
style, as form.
118
In the scene, and throughout the film, the martial movement by both the
north and the south represents a visuality that embodies specific affiliations to the different
regions, and in a violent, physical encounter, there is movement as action sequence and as
performative communication. Martial movement, or the body in the process of performing
martial arts, is not a negation of semiotic signs but a reconfiguration of such signs, and language
becomes a kind of verticality, a vertex where meaning and form collide, where the Sinophone is
not simply uttered in speech but through movement.
The Grandmaster is a film whose main narrative conflict focuses on a duel between
martial arts practitioners from the north and south. Both sides agree that they will each pick a

118
Roland Barthes, Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation, trans. Richard Howard and Annette
Lavers, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 112.
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contender, and these two representatives will compete to see which region has the best martial
arts. Once these stipulations are set, the film moves to focus on a group of masters from the
south convening to make a decision on who should be their representative. During this
meeting, the martial artists decide that Yip Man is best suited for the job. Their unanimous
decision to nominate Yip Man comes from his excellent martial arts prowess shown in the early
sequences of the film. They do not simply nominate him, but the southern masters also set a
test for him under the guise of passing on their knowledge to prepare him for his upcoming
encounter with Gong Yutian, the northern representative. To teach him their skills and to test
his fighting aptitude, they each engage him in a sparring match. Each of these matches are
brief, and each time, Yip Man proves he can go head-to-head with each of the other masters.
With every master he faces, it is a confrontation of styles and of regions.
The masters all speak to each other, talking down each other’s styles and talking up
their own. For example, Sister San, a prostitute with bound feet, approaches Yip Man as the
first contender. To prepare Yip Man for his face off with Gong Yutian, she fights Yip Man with
the Eight Trigram Palm style (baguazhang). This style comes from the northern parts of China
and has numerous off-shoots.
119
She identifies it as the Eight Trigram Palm style when speaking
to Yip Man, but it is also visually identifiable with its circular walking and the distinctive striking
style that she uses. The body communicates this northern style, and she also speaks Mandarin
saying, “Baguazhang is underhanded. Be careful.” This lining up of style origin and spoken
language constructs an image of the “north.” While they fight, she speaks in Mandarin and

119
Yang Jwing-Ming and Liang Shou-Yu, Baguazhang: Theory and Applications (Boston: Ymaa Publication Center,
2008), 42.
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fights with a northern style. Yet, Yip Man can respond to her in Cantonese and fight on par with
her in a southern style.
This scene between Yip Man and Sister San exemplifies a fluid dissonance. Shu-mei Shih
explains that linguistic dissonance emerges from the usage of various accented Mandarins
which jar the viewer and create a world where such linguistic disparities exist.
120
Linguistic
dissonance describes this scene but does not account for the different languages, including
embodied language, in their interaction. Here, fluid dissonance refers to the dissonances
between two separate Sinitic languages. The two contenders speak different languages from
each other, and their bodies also perform in two distinct regional styles. Despite this difference,
they are able to communicate and make contact with each other. They bodies play out
different martial arts styles, yet they can still productively fight in that their embodied language
produces a winner: Yip Man. They have a fluid conversation with their separate stylistic
affiliations.
The second and final competitors also show how fluid dissonance can occur and show
that such communicative incongruities can disrupt a unified visuality. The second competitor is
the brothel’s accountant, and he fights with in the Xingyiquan style. This style is mixed in its
origins because it has been passed down by numerous practitioners from different regions in
China.
121
While the lineage is scattered, the mythology behind Xingyiquan credits Yue Fei (960-
1280 A.D.) with its founding.
122
Xingyiquan is also identified as a Wudang style, which is a

120
Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 4.
121
Yang Jwing-Ming and Liang Shou-Yu, Xingyiquan: Theory, Applications, Fighting Tactics and Spirit (Boston: Ymaa
Publication Center, 2002), 11-13.
122
Yang and Liang, Xingyiquan, 13-17.
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northwestern practice associated with Taoism.
123
The accountant’s martial arts style focuses on
close range movement that is aggressive and packed with power. It also features simultaneous
attacking and defending. Like Sister San, he also speaks Mandarin. The fight with the
accountant is the most ambivalent and the shortest in duration. Yip Man easily defeats Sister
San and the accountant. With the accountant, the fluid dissonance continues as a southern
style clashes with a non-southern style martial art.
The last competitor, Brother Yong, however, proves to be the most difficult for Yip Man.
He begins his fight with Yip Man using the Hung Ga style. This form of martial arts is known for
being a southern style, and following the other competitors, Brother Yong speaks the language
associated with being from the south. Yip Man and this last competitor speak in Cantonese, and
they have the most copious exchange of words and of blows. Unlike the previous two fighters
who speak different languages but who are also able to communicate in an unhindered way
with Yip Man, Brother Yong and Yip Man do speak the same language. And so, it is not an
imagined communicative universe where difference manages to creep in to those in tune with
the linguistic difference, but in this portion of the film, they are literally speaking the same
language.
This fight appears to bring about the most cohesive universe with its lack of linguistic
difference, and a fluid dissonance also emerges in the scene. This fight highlights how
communication happens not only in words but also in a dialogue between their bodies. They
speak with words and spar with their bodies. While Brother Yong starts the fight with the Hung
Ga style, he soon switches to a different form of martial arts. This pattern of switching

123
Yang and Liang, Xingyiquan, 12.
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continues throughout the fight. Yip Man’s competitor even goes as far as also using Wing Chun,
the same southern style as Yip Man, to engage in the fight. When Yip Man questions Brother
Yong’s changing styles, Brother Yong exclaims, “I’m a jack of all trades.” As a jack of all trades,
Brother Yong embodies a fluid dissonance. He is fluent in various styles of martial arts and is
not limited by one particular system of body movement. He can move from Hung Ga to Wing
Chun without hesitation. The styles of various regions, north and south, coalesce in Brother
Yong’s performance. His movements are quite literally fluid, but these movements are also
dissonant in that they are distinct styles.
Brother Yong’s constant changes present both a visual continuity and discontinuity, but
the overall effect of this scene is one where the visuality of Chinese martial arts is rendered
unstable. Aside from the aural continuity posed by their use of Cantonese, visual continuity is
created through the syncing of styles and the movement of their bodies. Rather than a
northern style battling with a southern style, it is two southern styles confronting each other to
both learn as well as attempt to overcome one another. This syncing even goes as far as to
suggest that they are in complete alignment when they both use Wing Chun to fight each other.
Visual continuity is presented through the martial arts styling of the bodies in that they are
performing similar movements as they engage with one another. The bodies seem to move in
ways that conform to a cohesive visuality. At the same time, the constant changing of styles
refuses an easy visual seamlessness. When Brother Yong invokes Wing Chun, the visuality of the
scene is one of alignment, but when he moves on to different styles, such as Hung Ga, such a
fluid scene shifts quickly back to one where visual seamlessness is cast into question. Visual
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discontinuity is constructed through their varying styles despite aural continuity through their
spoken language.
Bother Yong uses a medley of mostly southern styles to fight against Yip Man. Southern
styles do provide a sense of a continuous visual universe in that they all originate from the
same region, but the presence of these different styles also points out how diverse southern
styles are. These differences are not only sub-schools, but the movement of these styles also
vary greatly. For example, both Wing Chun and Hung Ga are classified as southern styles.
However, Wing Chun is focused on softness and flexibility when countering one’s opponent,
and the strikes are focused on the economy of bodily energy and movement.
124
Hung Ga’s
movements are firm, beginning in a low horse-stance or based on more formulaic footwork
from Shaolin martial arts forms. While these movements are all based in the southern region of
China, they are distinctive styles that vary in their visual articulation. They put visually harder
styles in contrast with softer styles, and within these southern styles there are the
undercurrents of difference. Southern styles are not cohesive variations on each other that are
similar enough to be classified as the same style. Hung Ga and Wing Chun are both southern
styles, but they also reach towards opposing visual manifestation. In other words, southern
styles are not in the same visual vein, but they are veins orienting away from each other.
Differences of visuality, therefore, are articulated by both a consolidated image of the northern
styles versus the southern styles as well as oriented away from each other within the regional
divides.

124
Ip Chun and Michael Tse, Wing Chun Kung Fu: Traditional Chinese Kung Fu for Self-Defense and Health (New
York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998).
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This scene of passing on their skills and testing Yip Man’s own skills illustrates a fluid
dissonance through the violent clashing of different regional styles. Within the south, the
various systems of martial arts also confront each other as a battle for the title of the southern
master comes to a head. For Sister San and the accountant, Yip Man’s learning session with
them exemplifies a fluid dissonance through their systematized body movement in that each of
them performs a martial art that is its own form. Such fluid dissonance in these two fights are
further emphasizes with their spoken engagement as Mandarin and Cantonese communicate in
fluid ways despite their aural and linguistic dissonance. These matches show a confluence of
aural and visual clash, but Yip Man’s sparring match against Brother Yong pursues the question
of intraregional conflict. They both speak Cantonese, and Brother Yong’s use of both southern
and northern styles depicts fluency of body movement. This pairing intersperses visual and
linguistic dissonance with conflux, and these concurrent movements shed light on how inter-
and intra- regionality within a conception of Chinese martial arts and its history are actually
orientations and flows rather than impermeable systems.

Visual Mis(sed)communication: Obstruction, Split Personalities,
and Re-Orienting in Ashes of Time
While Ashes of Time was released well before The Grandmaster, the film brings to light
different, nuanced ways to look at orienting. The Grandmaster illustrates a network of nodes
that are contracting, expanding, and linking to one another. At the same time, representation
within the film is fairly linear or clearly delineated exemplified by the U.S. version where any
narrative ambiguity is erased with the intertitles explaining the historical circumstances. With
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the different versions of The Grandmaster languages are compartmentalized into nodes and
sites of contact. Looking back at Wong’s oeuvre, however, Ashes of Time, his first martial arts
endeavor, is not so clearly constructed. Ashes of Times does not share the relatively linear
narrative of The Grandmaster. In terms of its aural practice, the main language used in the film
is Cantonese. The former film also uses a grittier and almost dirty looking overlay, unlike the
dark ornate and highly stylized settings of The Grandmaster.
Why do these films differ so greatly? The intended audiences are different. With the
Grandmaster and the change in political systems following the Handover, Wong’s felt
compelled to appeal to different audiences: this is apparent from the different versions and
numerous language tracks. Ashes of Time, however, seems to be aiming at a different audience.
It was acclaimed on the international art house circuit and is highly localized in that it is a story
adapted from Jin Yong’s serialized novel.
125
More importantly, the two films address the
Sinophone with different forms of Chineseness in mind. The Grandmaster imagines a
networked nodular system that can be illegible at times because of its numerous
entanglements. Chineseness in Ashes of Time is imagined differently. There are no nodes or
sites, only grazes. If a node means contact, these grazes are where something has run askew
like a tangential line that never hits a mark.
Rather than sites of contact or encounter, these opportunities are always missed. Any
contact between the characters in the film made is only a slight brush of the hand. Each time
communication is attempted by the characters, it is unsuccessful in that it results in a brief

125
Wimal Dissanayake and Dorothy Wong, Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2003).
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experience of miscommunication. Meaning does not get exchanged. Contact is not about
producing a meaningful result but rather only results in unfulfilled meaning. These are missed
communications from miscommunications. In this section, I first briefly explore the relationship
between spoken language and the appearance of miscommunication. This sense of mis(sed)
communication is also replicated and reinforced by how disturbance is imagined in Ashes of
Time through visual obstructions in movements and contact between individuals and bodies. I
closely examine action scenes from the film and show how opportunities for communication
are purposefully or accidentally elided. I then analyze the split personality of the character
Murong Yin/Yang, which is a narrative element that disturbs clearly defined terms of
communication. They are one in the same character but their presence as two disrupts the
exchange and extension of meaning. This aural and visual disturbances that push the viewer
away from their own comfort is a practice in re-orienting. Disruptions appear to break the
visual universe but also produce alternative orientations from these breakages. Breaking as
practice is a process of destruction as well as the beginnings of re-orientation.
Here, the notion of aesthetics in Wong’s films is unavoidable. William Bettinson's work
on Wong Kar-wai discusses the importance of his filmmaking style. In particular, Bettinson's
work focuses on what he calls an aesthetic of disturbance.
126
This argument is rightly predicated
on previous scholarship that either places too much emphasis on Wong's social context and
instead argues for scholars to seriously consider the aesthetics of filmmaking and of Wong's
own style. It also diverges from the arguments about his auteur approach. Research focusing on

126
Gary Bettinson, The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetics of Disturbance (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015).
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Wong's auteur status focuses too much on Wong as a figure himself rather than the connection
between the films and style. The aesthetics of disturbance, therefore, is meant to bridge these
various elements of Wong as auteur and the particular style of his filmmaking that upends
audience expectations about images, viewing, and genre.
Indeed, Wong's work does exhibit the characteristics of the aesthetics of disturbance,
and Bettinson also lingers on Ashes of Time among Wong's films. At the same time, it would be
an oversight to not seriously consider the social, political, and cultural connections alongside
aesthetics. After all, aesthetics cannot be unhooked from such considerations. As Jacques
Ranciere argues in The Politics of Aesthetics, aesthetics and politics are intertwined. Aesthetics
and politics "distribute the sensible" and determine what is visible and invisible, and more
importantly what can and cannot be expressed. Ranciere says, " Politics and art, like forms of
knowledge, construct ‘fictions’... They define models of speech or action but also regimes of
sensible intensity. They draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the
sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and
making. They define variations of sensible intensities, perceptions, and the abilities of
bodies."
127
In other words, aesthetic systems regulate bodies and the intensities to which they
perform. Aesthetics are always political, which is embedded in the socio-historical and cultural
contexts. To consider the aesthetics of Wong's films, it is therefore necessary to consider how
such a system of aesthetics either disturbance or otherwise with regard to the politics of his
films.

127
Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 35.
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Imbuing the aesthetics of disturbance with politics, I propose to consider Wong's work
as a process of obstruction. Wong’s obstruction of the visual in his films has resonances with
disturbance in that it makes it audiences uncomfortable limiting their access to the images on
the screen. The emphasis on disturbance, however, does not highlight the process of the
purposeful obstructing of how audiences view scenes within the films. I also posit the notion of
obstruction as an alternative to disturbance because of its echoes with abstraction. Aside from
its phonetic similarities, these two words, abstraction and obstruction, work to purposefully
obscure a view. Obstruction can also imply an abstraction of the visual field. When objects or
figures are obstructed from view, the meaning of the scenes can become abstracted to the
viewer as well. The total purview of the audience is blocked off as if to make the viewer aware
that the scene they are seeing is always already one mediated by the viewer. It does not simply
disturb viewers, but the process of obstruction and abstraction make moves to disorient and
confuse viewers.
With disorientation from the obstruction of views and the abstraction of the visible,
opportunities to reorient appear as the viewer’s orientation is thrown off balance. Obstruction
allows for a queering of reorientation. Rather than adhering to a specific type of aesthetic as a
descriptor of his films, Wong’s works themselves move to highlight the process of mediation in
filmmaking and how it shapes viewers interaction with the media. If we read his films as
possessing an impetus towards obstruction, Wong’s works show how multiple views of a single
scene exist. Extending this metaphor of the visual, I argue that through the obstruction of the
visible field Wong’s films illustrate how the visual rethinks totalizing images and, therefore,
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Chineseness. Ultimately, the move away from a singular reading provided by the process of
visual obstruction allows the audience to rethink a monolithic image of Chineseness.
The process of obstruction is visible in Wong’s first foray into the martial arts genre,
Ashes of Time. The film was initially released in 1994, the same year as Chungking Express, one
of Wong’s most emblematic early films. From this earlier era, Wong’s films already have a
multilingual landscape at play. Some characters speak in Shanghainese, such as the roles
Rebecca Pan Di-Hua, who is a singer and actress from Shanghai, plays in Days of Being Wild and
In the Mood for Love. There are brief snippets of English and Mandarin in Happy Together. Yet,
none of these films have a sustained multilingual track like The Grandmaster. In fact, most of
his films to date, except for his post-1997 features, such as The Grandmaster, 2046, and My
Blueberry Nights, have mainly used Cantonese as the dominant language. Ashes of Time is not
an exception to this trend in Wong’s oeuvre. Most of the characters (and actors) are from Hong
Kong and speak Cantonese.
Alongside this lingua franca in the film, the story is based on a Jin Yong newspaper
serial, making it a film that is both intended for a Cantonese speaking audience but particularly
oriented toward Hong Kong. Although Jin Yong’s stories can be read in ways that address larger
visions of Chinese history because they take place in the mythical Jiang Hu or the mysterious
region of rivers and lakes where a sense of lawlessness ensues, Jin Yong’s stories are localized in
their production. His martial arts fiction is written in Hong Kong and published by Ming Pao, a
Hong Kong newspaper. Circulation of his stories reaches out to other Sinophone and non-
Sinophone sites. For example, his stories are available now in the United States as translations,
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and there are efforts to translate his more seminal works into English.
128
Despite this wide
circulation, his literature is distinctly embedded in Hong Kong. Ashes of Time, a very loose
adaptation of Jin Yong’s story, therefore, also speaks to such an orienting in that it is a film
made in Hong Kong with a mainly Hong Kong cast based on a martial arts serial published in a
Hong Kong newspaper.
With this Hong Kong-centered focus and use of Cantonese as the main language in the
film, Ashes of Time deals with a Sinophone experience and Chineseness that is based on a local
culture and concerns. The way in which the Sinophone grows and multiplies in relation to Ashes
of Time is through language interacting with its local context. Cantonese was the lingua franca
of Hong Kong throughout British colonial rule. It remains the main language used daily by
residents in the former colony turned SAR. Geared towards local concerns, Ashes of Time also
orients the Sinophone towards a conceptualization of Cantoneseness in the Sinophone. Rather
than saying it is a Hong Kong film because of its cast, audience, and original story, the use of
language and an image of Hong Kong origins constructs the film as a Cantonese and Hong Kong
orienting film. These are not categories, but they are directions in which Ashes of Time reaches.
The film attempts to branch towards these spaces and concepts, but it never quite gets there.
And so, with the use of Cantonese as the primary spoken language in the film, Ashes of Time
moves towards and understanding of Hong Kong that is integrally connected to and constituted
by its unique linguistic landscape. The local has its roots spreading towards notions of Hong
Kong cinema and into Cantonese as the lingua franca. There is a re-orientation of our

128
Vanessa Thorpe, “A Hero Reborn: ‘China’s Tolkien’ Aims to Conquer Western Readers,” The Guardian,
November 25, 2017, accessed December 10, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/26/chinese-
fantasy-kung-fu-legend-of-the-condor-jin-yong.
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understanding of what constitutes Hong Kong cinema in that it is not a category at all but a
possible path with which to begin to understand Ashes of Time.
Spoken language in the film, however, is not the main mode of communication, and in
fact, there is very little spoken language. There are bursts of dialogue and mainly narration by
the main character, but the film is mainly made up of visually striking movements of the body
as a mode of communication. While spoken language and Cantonese can orient the film in its
own directions and re-orient the understandings of how locality is understood in the context of
Hong Kong, visual language and the movement of the bodies on screen in Ashes of Time orient
the film otherwise. The film, therefore, can potentially address concerns over language in
numerous ways. With the body, language is about the missed communication and
miscommunication through visual means.
The language of the body in Ashes of Time is not about stylistic differences like in The
Grandmaster. In fact, no styles are named at all. The focus is on the interpersonal development
of each character and their narrative within the larger plot: individual styles and their
differences are not addressed in the film. Rather than a formalized style or medley of styles, the
characters in Ashes of Time have bodies that move in ambivalent motion, unregulated and
unbridled by formalistic elements. They fight with swords and with fists but do not affiliate
themselves with a school or style of martial arts. Unlike Bruce Lee’s style of no style, there is no
hint at any sort of previous bodily forms. Whereas Bruce Lee’s form of martial arts does not
have formal elements, it draws on other styles and focuses on utility. The image of martial arts
in Ashes of Time is a different lack of style, one where there is no hint at any other styles of
formalistic elements. This lack of a regulated style is jarring in a martial arts film, where style
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and the forms of the body are central in the economy of representation. There is a visual
discontinuity with the genre in which this film partakes.
This visual discontinuity is significant in that it upends our expectations of martial arts
film, and its mode of representation brings forward the potential for a re-orientation of martial
arts visuality. Contrasting with The Grandmaster, a film that at its foundation is about martial
arts styles and their implications, Ashes of Time eliminates style as a concern. Other martial arts
films, such as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, are not solely focused on style but have
moments where martial arts styles are discernable. In Ashes of Time, the characters fight, but
their bodies are not seen performing formalized martial arts. Style and form, therefore, are
deemphasized in favor of an alternative visuality for martial arts, which has also been
emphasized in various scholarship surrounding the film. From analyzing Wong’s shot-reverse-
shot techniques, lines of sight, and the use of space, Ashes of Time is an emblematic film that
paved the way for Wong’s later work.
129
This move towards an opened visuality is chaotic.
There is no discipline or focus for the body. The body is left unregulated and relegated to the
endless potentials of body movement and representations of bodies in action. There almost
seems to be no subjectivity because of the chaos in the field of representation. The opening of
martial arts visuality allows for a re-orientation. Martial arts films, like Ashes of Time, are not
bound to strict modes of martial arts visuality. There is instead space to construct alternative
visual economies.

129
Pan Guoling 潘國靈, Shijian de huijin, chenni de jizhi 時間的灰燼，沈溺的極致 [The ashes of time, the pinnacle
of wallowing], in Wang Jiawei de yinghua shijie 王家衛的映畫世界, eds. Huang Ailing 黃愛玲, Pan Guoling 潘國靈
, Li Zhaoxing 李照興 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 2015), 154.
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Wong disrupts generic sensibilities and filmic expectations. At the same time, Ashes of
Time is a film that does not adhere to expected visual codes and creates routes for other
possibilities. The film’s visuals are instantiated by a chaos of styles as well as breaks that re-
route and re-orient. The chaos of undisciplined bodies breaks with the sensibilities of martial
arts films. Ashes of Time expunges the possibility of even ruminating over stylistic differences
between bodies in that martial arts styles are not present. The characters lack regimented
bodies. This lack both breaks our sense of how a martial arts film is considered, but it allows for
us to reconsider how bodies are regulated and formalized. Through breaking genre
expectations, Ashes of Time re-orients the position of styles in martial arts film. This orientation
forces us to confront a film not about style and reflect on what constitutes style in martial arts
film. This re-orienting is not the devolvement into a new chaotic pattern but an opening up to
more possible routes.
Aside from the lack of style in the film, visual breakages are present in the visual effects
that are overlaid on the bodies in motion. James Udden’s work on Wong’s films illustrates the
importance of examining the visual techniques the director uses to disorient the audience.
Udden discusses the speed in which the action of Ashes of Time was shot, which was a
combination of slow motion, stop-action, and regular shooting. For example, Ouyang Feng was
shot at twelve frames per second, and the blind swordsman is shot in slow-motion.
130
These
types of visual breaks are a breaking in the visual world, a disruption of the bodies in action in
the film.

130
James Udden, “The Stubborn Persistence of the Local in Wong Kar-wai” Post Script 25, no.2 (Winter/Spring
2006): 71.
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The visual, therefore, in Ashes of Time is essential, and our consideration of the visual
should not be limited to shooting techniques but the overall mise-en-scène and style. The
overall film is enveloped in a sandy texture. The landscape in which all the action scenes occur
are in seemingly ambivalent plateaus composed of a dried, cracked, and yellow-hued
landscape. The sand of this plateau landscape also seeps into the indoor spaces, such as in the
taverns and in Ouyang Feng’s makeshift home. Ouyang Feng is the main narrator of the story in
Ashes of Time who hires assassins for those who request them. He is also a troubled character
himself and longs after his sister-in-law. This desire forces him into the dessert and a
melancholic state. The only landscape that is slightly different is Feng’s memory of his now-
sister-in-law, which is offset with blue tones and a softer lens effect. At times, there is an oasis
in the vast desert-like region of the film, but the sand permeates into every corner of the
screen. This sand already acts as a preliminary obstruction for the visible elements in Ashes of
Time. The sand renders all the bodies and the landscape itself into a blurry unclear space.
More importantly, the sand blocks our vision of bodies in motion, which can be seen in a
sequence involving a blind swordsman played by Tony Leung. The blind swordsman is not
identified by name, but Ouyang Feng recounts the story of the blind swordsman to the
audience. The blind swordsman initially approaches Ouyang Feng for a job to earn money for
transportation back to his hometown. Feng employs the blind swordsman to fight the bandits
plaguing the town. While the blind swordsman can fight valiantly, the sudden overcast impedes
his already limited vision, and he is struck down by the bandits. The entire fight takes place in
the town, and because it is outdoors, the scene is awash in dust and sand. The scenes of the
fight itself are covered in a grime. The screen overall has a gritty texture as the dust flies and
Chan Page 129 of 178

overlays the scenes like a camera filter. This sand, grit, and dust all prevent a clear image of the
fight from being seen. Although grittiness can be read as a symptom of being in the desert, the
way in which the dust flies on the screen works to make the view of the fight unclear. The dust
swirls and does not allow the bodies in motion to be seen in a clear way. This obstruction
makes the action of the scene a focus in its blurred textures. Right before the blind
swordsman’s demise, the screen cuts to a close-up of the sand blowing up from the ground,
and then a burst of light blocks the audience from seeing the violence of the swordsman being
beheaded by a bandit on a horse. The re-orientation of the film away from the focus on bodies
in martial arts films while having them as the scenic focus. This forces us to think of bodies in
this blocked visual form as at once the focus of the scene but also impeded by distractions. We
encounter the body motion but only for brief moments of clarity. In other words, the way in
which we interact with the body is as a fleeting moment. The bodies are askew in that we
cannot see them in full motion or as the entire frame and focus. The screen grazes the bodies
covered in a sandy grit.
With these obstructions, what Udden calls “the stubborn persistence of the local” in
Wong’s films comes through.
131
More importantly, however, the visual obstructions through
the grittiness on screen, the blurred textures, and shooting speeds creates possibilities for a re-
orientation of the local. Udden’s argument frames Wong’s films within a paradigm that splits
the local and the global into two diametrically opposed spheres. Rather than purely imagining
and insisting on the local, Wong’s films articulate the Sinophone, which triangulates the local,

131
Udden, “The Stubborn Persistence of the Local,” 67-79.
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Chineseness, and the global.
132
When considering the Sinophone, such division do not hold up.
In fact, the concept of the local as opposed to the global falls apart in the Sinophone because of
its networked structure.
133
Rather than thinking of Wong and by extension, Hong Kong cinema,
as having a strictly strong sense of localness and only localness, Wong’s use of obstruction and
his visual stylings point to breaks in the local where scenes are constructed so opaquely that
they resist clearly defined interpretations. In other words, the stubbornness does not simply
apply to the local in Wong’s films, but it is a stubbornness to easy interpretation. It is as if the
implication is that the space of Hong Kong and its literary and filmic traditions with Ashes of
Time represented with its obstructions is not a simple delineation of local versus the global, but
Wong’s work points to the fact that such spaces are complex negotiations, orientings and re-
orientings.
Apart from the gritty obstructions in Ashes of Time, blocking audiences from a complete
view of the scene is also practiced through visual lacunae. Visual blockages are present
throughout Wong’s cinema. Flannery Wilson says, “Because certain basic pieces of visual
information are omitted, such as the faces of cheating spouses, the viewer must conjure up, in
a Deleuzian sense, his or her own mental image.”
134
Here, speaking of In the Mood for Love and
2046, the focus is on the possibilities of the audience’s imagination where the viewer uses their
ability to “conjure up” that which is missing. A conjuring, however, is just a possibility and a
result of seeing or realizing that which is missing. This conjuring is, indeed, a possible result of

132
Audrey Yue “The Sinophone Cinema of Wong Kar-wai,” in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, ed. Martha P.
Nochimson. (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 232-49.
133
See Shu-mei Shih and Francoise Lionnet, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
134
Flannery Wilson, “Viewing Sinophone Cinema Through a French Theoretical Lens Wong Kar-wai’s ‘In The Mood
for Love’ and ‘2046’ and Deleuze’s Cinema,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, no 1 (Spring 2009): 150-
151.
Chan Page 131 of 178

viewing or not viewing something missing on the screen, but what happens when bodies are
present but obscured? For Ashes of Time, it is not information that is omitted, but bodies are
askew.
Such askew bodies are exemplified by the fighting scene between the blind swordsman
and the bandits is chaotic, and a state of confusion surrounds the scene. It is one swordsman
against a band of outlaws, and it is unclear at times where the bodies of the outlaws’ end and
when the body of the swordsman begins. The movements of the bodies blend into each other
in a series of close-ups and quick cuts. At one point the camera shows the audience a close-up
shot of the blind swordsman’s eyes and then it jumps to the clashing action between the
swordsman and bandits. The camera also moves to focus on the footwork of the fight, but it is
impossible to tell whose feet are being featured because almost all their footwear is the same.
The blind swordsman and his aggressors’ feet are bound up tightly in woven shoes and scraps
of cloth that are difficult to differentiate. Moreover, the bodies on the screen also block off the
action. No individual body is clearly featured or identifiable. This state of confusion blurs
together the bodies, and it becomes a singular mass of moving limbs. In this medusa-like
writhing of limbs, the only visual contact with the bodies in motion are slight grazes. The quick
cuts prevent the audience from focusing on one body and from creating a clearly delineated
body from the fighting crowd. Our gaze can only graze the bodies in a superficial way.
This grazing of the bodies is further reinforced by the choreography of the bodies in the
scene. With the quick cuts and close ups constructing an unidentifiable body object, in
moments of fighting where the camera creates a medium shot of the action, the blind
swordsman continues to be obstructed by other bodies, particularly the outlaws’ bodies falling
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away or rushing forward. The choreography of the bodies moving along the screen blocks the
blind swordsman’s body and movements. This choreography, however, is not a static
obstruction, but it highlights the grazing motion. The viewer can only tangentially notice and
spot these bodies on the screen. The bodies on the screen are always in motion grazing each
other and the viewer. These are all opportunities where communication in terms of bodies
coming into contact are missed. The bodies just graze each other rather than coming to full
blows. The bandits’ bodies also cause a miscommunication with the audience. They are both
moving but also in the process of blocking other actions behind them. They divert the
audience’s attention away from the central action by also being moving objects and bodies on
the screen, and they also block off the audience’s view of the blind swordsman. Rather than
focusing on the central action, the scene miscommunicates information that says these bandit
bodies, falling away and moving towards the swordsman, are the focus. They pull away the
audience’s attention from what is supposed to be the highlight of the scene, and the viewer is
left only with a handful of bodily grazes, brief contacts, and miscommunicated information.
Bodies askew, partially visible, obstructed, and passing gazes re-orient our sensibilities
not only about martial arts films but about visual disruption. Such passing bodies are not simply
destructive practices, but they create alternative ways in which more branches of
understanding martial arts films and visual disruption in Sinophone contexts. In Sinophone
films, and more particularly in films made in Hong Kong, there is no one way to feature bodies,
but in fact, bodies can be askew and visually tangential. There is not one way to feature bodies
in martial arts films, but numerous ways in which bodies can be simultaneously featured and
drawn away from as the focus of the scenes.
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The way in which bodies are obstructed or made only partially visible speaks to the
particular condition of a post-1997 Hong Kong, particularly with Ackbar Abbas’ notion of
disappearance in relation to Chineseness. In his seminal work on Hong Kong culture, Abbas
notes, “[…] the Hong Kong Chinese are not culturally and politically quite distinct from
mainlanders; two peoples separated by a common ethnicity, a first example of
disappearance.”
135
The notion that Hong Kongers and mainlanders are supposed to share an
ethnicity and culture is precisely that which separates them. This disappearance and “dis-
appearance” for Abbas is not a “nonappearance, absence, or lack of presence” but one that is
where something is misrecognized, replaced, and something to which cultural participants
respond.
136
Indeed, as Hong Kong approached 1997, the urgency to protect and maintain Hong
Kong’s distinct social, political, and cultural identity was and is tangible.
This urgency is reflected in Ashes of Time, but it is not limited to the culture of
disappearance that Abbas discusses. While Abbas discussed disappearance at length, the film
and its obstruction of bodies literalizes the anxieties surrounding Hong Kong with the
impending handover. Though an extension of the obstructed bodies, particularly of Hong Kong
bodies that are made difficult to see or represent, the film showcases the anxiety of Hong Kong
in the impending handover. The handover of Hong Kong from the British to the PRC can also be
seen as Hong Kong being reabsorbed by mainland China. Rather than being its own state, it is
subsumed as Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.
Hong Kong in its previous iteration is made to disappear when it is internationally recognized as

135
Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), 2.
136
Abbas, Hong Kong, 8.
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part of the PRC. In this way, Ashes of Time is dis-appearance turned prophecy. From Ashes of
Time’s Hong Kong acting talent and their bodies to even the story constructed by Jin Yong,
these bodies are made to be seen under the guise of something else, obstructed and
destructed.
With this condition of dis-appearance and literal disappearance of bodies on screen,
elements of the film critique the origins of Hong Kong and discourses of Chineseness. Prior to
1997, Hong Kong was the main purveyor of Chinese cinema, especially Chinese martial arts
cinema. Yet, there has always been this collapse between Hong Kong, China, the PRC and who
gets to claim that the right to represent China and “Chinese.” In Ashes of Time, the distinctly
Hong Kong talent is not shown clearly, and audiences are refused access to the images of the
stars they went to see. Like the bodies on screen, the origins of martial arts cinema in the
Sinophone context becomes unclear. These askew bodies force audiences to question, what
makes this a Hong Kong martial arts film if the bodies and stories which mark it as particularly
Hong Kong cannot be seen and are purposely not featured. Such impetus sheds light on how
origins and authentic representation of Hong Kong and its martial arts cinema is tenuous with
constructions of Chineseness.

Productive Destruction in Sinophone Contexts
Wong Kar-wai’s films in a broad way destroy or at least obstruct the formation of
normalized ideas of Chineseness through a visual language of the body. The way in which such
a language forms is through partial views, gritty textures, and obstructed bodies. Visual
continuity is disavowed. Furthermore, by shattering the singular alignment between the visual
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and the audio in the constructed world of the narrative whether across multiple versions of a
single film or in a single version of a film, Wong aims to open up space rather than leaving ruins,
making it a productive approach. This opening of space for alternative definitions and claims to
Chineseness is brought about by the orientations and reorientations of the films where in Ashes
of Time and The Grandmaster bodies reach out their limbs in various directors, simultaneously
extending and retracting placing their own limitations on a view of Chineseness in the context
of Hong Kong. Rather than aiming for only China and the Chinese film market, such orientations
in Wong’s martial arts films lay claim to a networked Chineseness that exposes multiple borders
and nodes of what counts as “Chinese” culture and the authority to represent it. For the case of
Hong Kong and Wong’s films in an impending condition of dis-appearance with 1997 and the
post-1997 film market, this extension of bodies and the language it forms critiques notions of a
centralized China making visible Hong Kong, which is on the verge of disappearance, at least
partially visible in such uncertain political conditions.
While the modes of bodily representation proliferate, obstruction is not the solution for
resolving representation in martial arts films and their participation in constructing ideas of
Chineseness. In fact, visual obstruction is a mode in which a productive practice of destruction
occurs that opens routes but does not provide a singular path as a resolution. It points to the
multiplicity and possibility of proliferation rather than focusing on a singular orientation.
Multiplicity through obstruction, for example, is manifest through the blending of bodies in the
fight between the swordsman and the bandits. There is not a singular body, but many bodies
morphing together and writhing in action. This multiplicity is partially liberatory in that it opens
more paths and routes for various orientations, but it also does not concede a solution to the
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problem of Chineseness with a clear-cut answer. I refer to this as a productive practice of
destruction because it destroys the sense of a singularity of Chineseness articulated through
bodies on screen in favor of multiples. The bodies on the screen in violent impetus appear
exponential in their movements. Such obstruction does not stop the potential for movement,
but in fact, increases the possibilities of paths. Destruction does not leave behind decrepit ruins
but can be the foundations of alternative structures.
In his analysis of The Grandmaster, David Bordwell skillfully extricates the intricacies of
Wong’s film. He explains that with the scenes, cuts, and jarring shots that there is a mosaic of
martial arts. His take on the multiple versions sets up what he calls a “Chinese kaleidoscope.”
137

This kaleidoscope is a refraction of what “Chinese” appears to be, and it is fragmentary and
made up of pieces that reflect a whole. Yet, the implication of this is that a singular image does
exist, and the kaleidoscope is the result of directorial manipulation of the camera and versions.
While this may be partially the case, when there is no singular image or center, it is impossible
for the kaleidoscope to be the refraction.
For The Grandmaster and Ashes of Time, centers are not present and, therefore, there is
no centralized image of Chineseness to refract. There is, instead, a web of orientations that is
perpetually dynamic and explosive like martial arts movements themselves. The various
versions of The Grandmaster orient the film in numerous directions both outwards and
inwards. It implies that certain audiences are watching, such as an international audience, and
deploys specific assumptions, such as expectations of an audience’s lingua franca. There is not

137
David Bordwell, “THE GRANDMASTER: Moving Forward, Turning Back,” Observations on Film Art (blog),
September 23, 2013, accessed December 10, 2018, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/09/23/the-
grandmaster-moving-forward-turning-back/.
Chan Page 137 of 178

one version that it the most authentic or original, but they are all branches orienting in various
directions and to different audiences. Moreover, some versions, such as the multilingual one,
work to distract and disorient the audience. Distraction and disorientation are themselves
practices in productive directionalities. Distraction is also present in Ashes of Time with the
landscape’s attempt to make bodies obscure on screen. As sand moves across, it blurs and
distorts the bodies orienting away from clearly delineated bodies in martial arts films and
towards a massive body patchwork that highlights multiple existences. There is no singular
wholistic experience of the body. This notion is further reinforced by the presence of Murong
Yang and Yin. They are both the same person as well as a multiple of personas that queer the
orientation of the film.
138

Ultimately, The Grandmaster and Ashes of Time show explorations of multiple
orientations. The films connect, break, reconnect, and expand the Sinophone. This expansion
and orientation shed light on the fact that the Sinophone cannot be contained by center-
periphery dynamics, but it is in fact networked by nature. There is no singular center that
influences peripheral activities. At the same time, the Sinophone is not a static network
because of the lack of a center. It expands and contracts at different nodes, and this movement
indicates productive activity. Destruction and expansion all construct possible routes and roots
for alternative articulations of Sinophone identities.

138
See also Chen, Ya-chen. “As Simple as an Egg: Lessons about Love in Ashes of Time,” Asian Cinema 17, 2
(Fall/Winter 2006): 84-102.
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V. Remixing Chineseness: Censorship, Disembodiment,
and the Voice in Hong Kong Digital Media
A familiar figure appears on the screen: a single man dressed simply in a white shirt and
black pants coming home from work. He faces a line of tanks with their artillery pointed at him.
Their massive armored bodies confront this individual figure. The camera pulls out to show an
aerial shot revealing the power behind this everyday man. He does not have any militarized
backup, but there is only a shadow, which is not his own but that of a martial arts deity,
showing that the courage of a single individual can face an armed legion. The figure being
evoked in this scene from Hong Kong-based video production collective, GVA Creative’s,
“GwanGong vs. Alien,” is Tank Man from Tiananmen in 1989. Tank Man and citations of his
figure have been censored in the People’s Republic of China, but it is familiar imagery in Hong
Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. The Tank Man reference is a direct critique of
the PRC’s tightening policies over freedom of speech in the SAR and protests the censorship of
media. Such allusion highlights the continual tension between the PRC and Hong Kong,
especially as the Chinese Communist Party and the state become more involved in the
production of cinema and other media in the former British colony.
Cultural production in Hong Kong has been increasingly associated with the mainland.
While not all mainstream Hong Kong cultural production has been fully absorbed by mainland
interests, the PRC has exerted growing influence and become an inevitable consideration for
Hong Kong cultural producers. Mirana Szeto and Yun Chung Chen have dubbed this
Chan Page 139 of 178

“mainlandization.”
139
This phenomenon is brought on by the enormous amount of theater
seats, ticket sales, and overall buying power of China’s economy as well as the influx of cheaper
labor for below-the-line practices in film production. With this growing consideration of the PRC
and its massive film market, the politics of cinema in Hong Kong have changed drastically and
filmmakers must abide by China’s censorship requirements to screen their films in mainland
China.
While mainstream directors in Hong Kong have more and more restrictions in terms of
the type of content one can produce, online social networking platforms have flourished as
sites for younger, local filmmakers to produce and circulate digital video content. YouTube,
which is still available in Hong Kong, plays a pivotal role in popularizing short films released by
various Hong Kong-based producers. While YouTube and Google are both still available in Hong
Kong, they are unavailable in the PRC.
140

Addressing the concerns of the shifting cinema industry, I focus on the works of GVA
Creative, a collective that is based in Hong Kong. I refer to these video makers as collectives
because of the collaborative nature of their work. GVA Creative as both a collective group and
channel on YouTube and other online media outlets is the result of different video producers,
editors, actors, and other talent coming together to form a cohesive identity. While smaller
teams may work in tandem to create different online videos, they release them under the same
channel name on YouTube. There are also other creative groups active on YouTube, Vimeo, and
other social networking platforms from Hong Kong, such as Gun N Cult, that make a variety of

139
Mirana M. Szeto and Yun-Chung Chen, “Mainlandization or Sinophone Translocality? Challenges for Hong Kong
SAR New Wave Cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, no. 2 (2012): 115-34.
140
Rebecca Fannin, “Why Google is Quitting China,” Forbes, January 15, 2010, accessed May 14, 2018,
https://www.forbes.com/2010/01/15/baidu-china-search-intelligent-technology-google.html.
Chan Page 140 of 178

videos, but few remain as active as GVA Creative. In GVA Creative’s independent shorts posted
on YouTube, Facebook, as well as their own website, the use of martial arts tropes, silence and
sound, and the manipulation of bodies as forms of language that express a localized Hong Kong
identity grapples with censorship, the presence of the People’s Republic of China, and
alternative articulations of Chineseness. I define Chineseness following Shu-mei Shih’s critique
of Gungwu Wang.
141
“Chinese” is not an essentialized identity nor a “cultural spectrum of
Chineseness” where “one can be more Chinese, and another can be less Chinese.”
142
Rather,
Chineseness emphasizes the process of localizing culture, language, and identity. The term
“Chineseness” highlights the notion that cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and nationality, among
other aspects of identity, are not static concepts but are always transforming based on local
articulations that are subject to transformation over time.
GVA Creative is a small Hong Kong-based collective of actors, directors, producers, and
video makers founded in 2012. Their videos range from fifteen seconds to fifteen minutes long.
The collective specializes in visual services, which include 3D and 2D animation, special effects,
and live-action work. They also garnered numerous accolades such as the 2013 ICT Award Best
Digital Entertainment (Student and Independent Group) Gold Award and 16th TBS DigiCon6
Awards Gold Award in 2014 among others. Their most popular shorts include, “GwanGong vs
Alien,” “Zombie Guillotines,” and “Hong Kong Will Be Destroyed After 33 years,” which went
viral in March 2014. Aside from creating shorts, GVA Creative also advertises a set of services

141
Gungwu Wang, “Chineseness: The Dilemmas of Place and Practice,” in Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and
the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the 20th Century, ed. Gary Hamilton (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1999), 129.
142
Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 27.
Chan Page 141 of 178

ranging from pre- and post-production and prop making. Although their own creative shorts
have been the most popular, they also provide services and make extended advertisements or
commemorative works for commercial companies, such as Sony.
GVA Creative has focused on martial arts, science-fiction, and local Hong Kong identities
in their videos. Martial arts, however, is not exclusive to GVA Creative. Other content creators
on YouTube also use martial arts, such as “Kung Fu Rider” and the related “Kung Fu Cafe,”
where the channel creators talk to martial artists in a couch-interview format. GVA Creative’s
citation of martial arts includes an added dimension of focusing on banal activities as well.
Previous studies of martial arts films either focused on how they related to grand narratives of
the nation and national identity.
143
The nation and the concept of an imagined community in
relation to “China” has also been centralized through the study of Chinese-language cinema
more broadly.
144
To expand our consideration of the martial arts discourse and building on
Paola Voci and Dorothy Lau’s work on martial arts and the digital age, I examine how martial
arts are reinterpreted in the liminal space of a digital Hong Kong where the practice of
assemblage and remixing mythologies and common figures, such as the iconic People’s
Liberation Army soldier from the Cultural Revolution, Lei Feng, and martial deity, Guan Gong,
becomes commonplace. The process of remix sheds light on how the politics of language can be
critiqued by those working in digital spaces. Namely, it shows a shift from an emphasis on
spoken language to a remixed and rearranged visual embodied language. This remix constructs
an imagined community and rhetoric of Chineseness with permeable borders that pushes

143
Stephen Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009),
172-195.
144
Sheldon Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, and Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1997), 12-19.
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against monolithic and regulated images of Chineseness by the People’s Republic of China
within a system that is becoming more controlled.

Ambivalent Censorship in One Country with Two Systems
Censorship in Hong Kong is an ambiguous practice. Since 1997, Hong Kong’s ties with mainland
China have been increasingly close. One pressing issue in Hong Kong as part of the “One
country, two systems” policy is maintaining a certain degree of autonomy. The system was
introduced by Deng Xiaoping, who instituted various reforms during the opening up of China in
the post-Cultural Revolution era, in the 1980s to govern regions that have been historically
outside of the PRC’s purview, such as Macau and Hong Kong. “One country, two systems”
allowed Macau and Hong Kong to retain their own economic and legal systems, but they are
both considered part of China.
145
In other words, while they have economic and relative legal
autonomy, they have no political sovereignty.
In terms of the PRC’s media production, the main task of the National Radio and
Television Administration (formerly known as the State Administration of Radio, Film, and
Television and the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television) is to
regulate state-owned production outlets as well as screen media from other production
companies. The NRTA also manages distribution licenses and filmmaking permits among other
things. This official organ is responsible for regulating cultural production and distribution, and
for a film to circulate in mainstream theaters within the PRC, the censors must first approve it.

145
Wang Zhenmin 王振民, Yiguo liangzhi yu jibenfa: lishi, xianshi yu weilai 一國兩制與基本法 : 歷史、現實與未
來 [One Country, Two Systems and the Basic Law : History, Reality and the Future], (Hong Kong: Sanlian
Shudian, 2017).
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Films shown without such approval risk being shut down and banned from screening.
146

The PRC’s censorship policies have also influenced internet content production. Already,
the PRC and its censors have a highly controlled media and internet environment. At times,
words are banned or prevented from being posted on Chinese social media websites, such as
Weibo, a site akin to Twitter. For example, during the democracy protests in Hong Kong in
2014, a flurry of terms related to Hong Kong, protests, and students were blocked on Weibo.
“Hong Kong students,” “Go Hong Kong,” and “Today we are all Hong Kongers” were all blocked
on Weibo as of September 29, 2014.
147
Apart from regulating social media, online videos are
also now subject to censorship regulations. Previously, online big movies (OBMs), which are
feature length or series of videos posted online produced in the PRC, could circulate over the
internet. Many had a video game aesthetic with point-of-view shots and storylines reminiscent
of role-playing games with zombie or fantasy themes. As of 2018, however, these OBMs have
been censored as well.
148

While the NRTA and online censors are active in the PRC, censorship in Hong Kong is
more ambiguous because of its Special Administrative Region (SAR) status. The laws, therefore,
surrounding filmmaking and media production in Hong Kong are different. Despite this
difference and assumed level of autonomy in Hong Kong, there has also been speculation that
the PRC is beginning to restrict freedom in Hong Kong on multiple fronts.
Tensions between the PRC and Hong Kong can also be seen through the case of five

146
Alex Suber, “Back to the Underground: A Year of Chinese Film Festival Shutdowns,” Cineaste 41, no.3 (2016):
40-43.
147
China Digital Times. “Sensitive Words: Hong Kong Protests (Updated),” China Digital Times, September 29,
2014, accessed June 8, 2018, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/09/sensitive-words-hong-kong-protests/.
148
Vice, “Beating Film Censorship: Online Big Movies,” Vice International, December 22, 2017, accessed January
14, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyj7A6iD9Nk.
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booksellers who were abducted in recent years. In late 2015 and early 2016, five booksellers in
Hong Kong disappeared, and news outlets and reporters speculated that they were being
detained by the People’s Republic for selling material deemed inappropriate for circulation. In
January 2018, Gui Minhai, the owner of Causeway Bay Bookstore, one of the abductees from
2015, and a Swedish citizen, was arrested for a second time.
149
Despite the lack of clarity
surrounding the circumstances of the booksellers, the suspicion highlighted by news articles
about the disappearances illustrates the increasing unease and distrust between the PRC and
Hong Kong.
With these different tensions surrounding media in Hong Kong, digital video on social
networking sites become alternative platforms for younger filmmakers who may not fit into the
current mainstream trends that toe the line with the PRC. This is not to say that the process of
digital video making is mutually exclusive with mainstream cinematic practice or essentially and
irreconcilably different, but they are different outlets and platforms with varying levels of state
regulation and distinct audiences.
It is from this context of politics, censorship, and ambivalence that GVA Creative
emerged online. Digital platforms and their potentialities in the Chinese context have been
discussed by scholars in relation to soft power. Paola Voci extensively discusses how animation
and martial arts in particular has moved away from empowering the state and sentiments of
nationalism and allows posthuman bodies to explore virtual spaces whose connection to reality

149
Ben Westcott and Steven Jiang. “Sweden Demands Answers from China over Detained Book Publisher,” CNN,
January 24, 2018, accessed May 10, 2018 https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/23/asia/sweden-china-gui-minhai-
intl/index.html.
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is a tenuous one.
150
While this is the case for animated “bodies in the air,” GVA Creative’s work
draws on different tropes that are localized to Hong Kong and the former British colony’s
relationship to the PRC.
151
GVA Creative’s two-part series, “GwanGong vs. Alien,” directly
addresses the presence of the People’s Republic in Hong Kong. This short series is the longest
video on their site to date, and it is a parodic remake of a 1976, the film God of War directed by
Hung Min Chen. The short begins with an alien invader landing in Hong Kong at some point in
the not-so-distant future. Initially, the alien seems to be friendly, but it quickly turns into a
bloodbath in the city. The alien wreaks havoc by blowing up the Hong Kong skyline and quite
literally crushing people under its feet. To combat the alien, an army that highly resembles the
People’s Liberation Army, the armed forces of the PRC with their starred caps and dark green
uniforms, assembles a small group of three soldiers. The unit is equipped with giant robots to
do battle with the alien.
Political critique and speech are not censored within Hong Kong, and such discussion of
politics is allowed to circulate globally because of YouTube’s availability in the SAR. The
presence of forbidden images in Hong Kong YouTube videos already makes this media distinct
from mainstream media in both Hong Kong and mainland China. GVA Creative's images are
subversive citations. These subversive images are not lingered on nor depicted in immense
amounts of detail, but they nonetheless refer to images that cannot circulate or even be
referenced in PRC media. GVA Creative's presence, however, is not a static diametrically
opposed representational structure with the PRC. Rather, they occupy a specific kind of

150
Paola Voci, “Animating virtual soft power. Digital Animation’s dreams, nightmares and wonders” in Screening
China’s Soft Power, eds. Paola Voci and Luo Hui (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 188.
151
Zhen Zhang. “Bodies in the Air: The Magic of Science and the Fate of the Early ‘Martial Arts’ Film in China,” Post
Script 20, no. 2-03 (2001): 61-76.
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ambivalent space where censorship and how it's being enforced is constantly mutating.
Hong Kong's precarious position as a SAR reinforces this censorial experience. Hong Kong’s
internet mediascape is neither independent from nor completely subsumed into China. This
political ambivalence allows for alternatives to mainstream representation to emerge but also
makes it necessary to tread carefully as repercussions for transgression remain unknown. These
shorts therefore navigate such threat of censorship in political ways that potentially open
spaces for dissent.

Disembodied Voices and Spoken Language Politics in Post-1997 Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s tenuous relationship with the mainland is apparent in the politics surrounding
language and the voice. Hong Kong’s official languages are Chinese and English, but no
particular Chinese language is specified.
152
On the other hand, the PRC’s official language is
Mandarin. The use of an official language in the PRC is enforced in that all state media and
official interactions are held in Mandarin rather than other Sinitic languages. With these
differences in language policies, official language policies and spoken language are areas of
contention between Hong Kong and the PRC. In this section, I examine how the voice is
represented in GVA Creative’s “GwanGong vs Alien” and intertwined with the politics
surrounding Hong Kong. Through a strategic mobilization of spoken languages and
technological modulation, the video series articulates a remixed voice.
Remix is a participatory practice that has been deployed by creators before the dawn of

152
Hong Kong Basic Law, March 17, 2008, accessed May 20, 2018
http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/tc/basiclawtext/chapter_1.html.
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the digital age that moves media creation into a horizontal network of production and
consumption. Although the digital, as Dorothy Lau, argues has the ability to challenge the
dominant structures of cultural work, the digital is not inherently liberating and can in fact
reinforce an essentialized image of “Chinese.”
153
Rather than solely emphasizing digital
platforms, I draw on Eduardo Navas’ notion of the “Remix.” According to Navas, “The remix is in
the end a re-mix—that is a rearrangement of something already recognizable…The remix when
extended as a cultural practice, as a form of discourse, is a second mix of something pre-
existent.”
154
Hong Kong YouTube collectives, particularly GVA Creative, participate in the
practice of remix, and one way in which this is exemplified is through the dynamics of spoken
languages in their shorts. In “GwanGong vs. Alien,” a multilingual soundscape is present.
Characters speak both Mandarin and Cantonese with various accents that are politically
charged. One interaction overtly addresses the politics of language in the short. In a scene in
which the soldiers introduce themselves, Hu Wen says in almost perfect standardized
Mandarin, “Hu Wen, reporting.” Pu Jingyan follows suit. Wu Changsheng, however, begins his
introduction in Cantonese, but their commander reprimands him. Rolling his eyes as an obvious
form of disrespect, Wu slowly reports in to the commander using a Hong Kong Cantonese
accented Mandarin.
This scene and the use of spoken language by the soldiers and their commander
illustrates the spoken language hierarchy at play in this fictional world. His presence depends
on his Mandarin speech. Cantonese, therefore, is not viewed as a valid language to use at least

153
Paola Voci, China on video: Smaller-screen Realities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 56.
154
Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (New York: Springer, 2012), 67.
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for official interactions, which reflects the policy of the PRC. Others have observed that
Cantonese can have a certain power as well, especially in the context of Shenzhen, where
Cantonese and the ability to speak it carries a certain amount of cultural capital.
155
Although
this may be the case for businesses in Shenzhen, the language policies reflected in the short
emphasize the political power of Mandarin over Cantonese.
Further complicating the notion of language and politics, the short engages with the
manipulation of the voice. The language that GwanGong uses is a rendition of remixing that
brings to the forefront technology and vocal tuning. When GwanGong speaks Mandarin, his
identifying characteristic is that the voice is technologically modulated. This tuning points to its
own manipulation and highlights the use of technology and effects to make alien what is
recognizable. The disembodied voice of GwanGong is modulated through overt manipulation.
Echoes are added, and the voice is tuned to a deeper pitch. This modification illustrates that the
voice does not belong to any specific region or geographical place. The use of the disembodied,
technologically modified voice embodies a paradoxical construct of power that critiques the
notion of a centralized Chinese identity defined by accent and spoken language. On the one
hand, GwanGong’s voice is marginal. It does not align with any specific institution or
constructed social hierarchy. His Mandarin cannot reinforce PRC or even regionally defined
Chinesenesses because it lacks specific aural accent or marker. In other words, GwanGong’s
voice is deterritorialized. The voice is altered, and this transformation of his voice
reterritorializes it in the realm of the virtual.
156
Such technological tuning does not allow the

155
Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005), 128-131.
156
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 10.
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audience to place the voice in a specific place or time. The lack of regionality refuses an
appropriation of the voice for nationalist or even localized agendas.
In addressing issues of aurality, Sinophone studies has focused more on accents per
various regional variations or linguistic families.
157
Chinese-language cinema studies has mainly
focused on the cultural centrality of an imagined community of “Chinese” people while
marginalizing the localization of the speaking voice.
158
In Sinophone cinemas studies, the voice
as subtitle, aural motif, or thematic has been well researched.
159
Issues of the voice and
language beyond such bounded terms, however, have not been sufficiently analyzed. More
importantly, the intervention of technology into the voice has been largely ignored. In this case,
the “beyond” points to the supernatural voice mediated by a technological process.
GwanGong’s accent and manner of speaking are therefore not positioned within a specific
geographic location. In fact, because he needs to possess the body of the soldier to fight the
alien, GwanGong is a disembodied voice, an acousmetre.
160
The lack of a corporeal existence
allows his presence to be seemingly omnipotent and ubiquitous.
With this practice of remix, rearrangement, and technological experimentation, GVA
Creative’s video comments on the language politics of Hong Kong. It scrutinizes the notion of an
official language by manipulating it. It is not that an official language is made by a media
producer, disseminated, and simply absorbed by the masses, but the masses can also put their
own lilt on the language. They provide an alternative voice through the remix of previous voices

157
Shih, Visuality and Identity, 4-6.
158
Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, and Politics (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 1-4.
159
Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo, Sinophone Cinemas (London: Palgrave Macmilian, 2014).
160
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 17-29.
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and images and put into place the potential for a radical language politics that moves away
from the acceptance of state hegemony and policies and towards a deterritorialized language.

Visual Citation: Forming a Rhetoric of Chineseness
The numerous spoken languages and technological interventions into speech operate alongside
the visualization of the bodies on screen. Although spoken language in the short reflects a
critique of Chineseness through technical manipulation and the presence of an acousmetre,
spoken language in the two-part short is minimal. GwanGong’s voice is heard the most, but it is
not used in extensive dialogue. GwanGong’s speech is also more of a monologue spoken to Wu
when he explains from where his power is derived. With this shift of focus away from spoken
language, body language and visual citation emerges as the alternative mode of communication
and meaning exchange.
Visual citation and embodied presences play a key role in how “GwanGong vs. Alien”
remix Chineseness. The short itself is a conscious adaptation of an earlier film from Taiwan, and
this remaking process already places the short series into the rhetoric of remix. GVA Creative is
taking media made by other producers and rearranging specific visual and thematic practices,
such as the alien invader genre and the inclusion of the mythical martial deity. At the end of the
series, archival news footage plays before the image of Tank Man. This use of news footage is a
visual citation that outlines the stakes of the short itself and the politicized images of Tank Man,
Lei Feng, and GwanGong. The practice of citation in remixing ties all of these images and
presences together in a politics of reimagining resistance in the digital realm.
Jennifer Sano-Franchini argues in “Cultural Rhetorics and the Digital Humanities: Toward
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Cultural Reflexivity in Digital Making,” rhetoric and culture are intricately connected to each
other and hinges on the processes of the discursive practices of knowledge making.
161
In
“GwanGong Vs. Alien,” the visual is a manifestation of the practice of remix and the dynamic
formation of a rhetoric that informs Chineseness in Hong Kong. Throughout this chapter, I have
referred to the character of GwanGong as such rather than Guan Gong or Guan Yu. The short
directly cites this character from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and historical figure
serving under Liu Bei from the Eastern Han dynasty.
162
This reference it already itself a remix
that relies on a shared rhetoric of Chineseness and involved the transformation of the familiar
into something else. In the short, Guan Gong as martial deity is recognizable to Sinophone
audiences, and his presence in the short is visually accented. “GwanGong” rather than “Guan
Yu,” “Guan Di,” and “Guan Gong” shows an alternative way of referring to the deity that is not
in a standardized romanization, such as Pinyin. The familiar character of “Guan Gong” is
remixed into “GwanGong,” a deity that possesses Hong Kongers to imbue them with strength
to fight danger and oppression. The mythology surrounding the deity as a marker of an
assumed authentic Chineseness is upturned. The sense of essential Chineseness derived from
myth, accent, and voice does not hold true when the source of the myth and voice are
purposefully changed. Such forms of remix and the adding of accent to myth critiques the
concept of an essential Chinese identity bound by a shared visual imagination and offers an
alternative through an alternative manifestation of a spiritual deity. In other words, Guan Gong

161
Jennifer Sano-Franchini, “Cultural Rhetorics and the Digital Humanities: Toward Cultural Reflexivity in Digital
Making,” in Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, eds. Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 52-53.
162
Yan Qingyang 顏清洋, Cong guanyu dao guandi 從關羽到關帝[From Guan Yu to Guan Di], (Taipei: Yuan Liu,
2006).
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and his position as purveyor of Chinese culture based on shared myths, legends, and history is
brought into question when his name is one that becomes the subject of experimentation.
The body and different visuals are rearranged and remixed to form a rhetoric of
Chineseness in the short film, which takes familiar visuals and rearranges them into a form of
implied communication. One such example is the presence of Mecha-Lei Feng. The soldiers
tasked to defeat the invader are equipped with giant robots to do battle with the alien, called
Mecha-Lei Feng. This mechanical presence is a visual citation of Lei Feng, a People’s Liberation
Army soldier who has become a mythologized figure in the modern history of the PRC. He died
in 1962 at twenty-one years old; following his death, the state lionized him as a propaganda
figure.
163
His selflessness and model citizenship were emphasized, and different posters and
paraphernalia stated that everyone should “Learn from Lei Feng.” Moreover, he remains an
important figure in the PRC with multiple films depicting his life, such as Lei Feng in 1959
(2013), The Sweet Smile (2013), and Youthful Days (2013).
164

Lei Feng, therefore, remains a cult icon even today, and the GVA Creative short taps into
this iconography. As if his name were not enough, the Mecha-Lei Feng is decked with the PLA
soldier star, and the fact that the robot refers to the mythologized solider is unmistakable.
Through this overt citation of Lei Feng, a remixed rhetoric of Chineseness based on a visual
language begins to take shape. Virginia Kuhn explains that a rhetoric is formed by the practice
of remix, which she defines as “a digital utterance expressed across the registers of the verbal,

163
Louise Edwards, "Military Celebrity in China: The Evolution of 'Heroic and Model Servicemen'" in Celebrity in
China, eds. Louise Edwards and Elaine Jeffreys (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 26-29.
164
Elaine Jeffreys, “Understanding the Lei Feng Revival: Evidence from a Survey of Chinese Students.” China Media
Research, 13, no.2 (2017): 54.
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the aural, and the visual.”
165
In other words, digital remixing spans different modes of
utterances. From this associative reading, writing, and remixing, a rhetoric forms in that there
are different signals in the utterances to facilitate understanding to the viewing audience. The
use of not just a familiar but a cult figure becomes a signifier for the presence of the PRC. There
is a collapse of multiple meanings into this image. First, Lei Feng is himself, the historical model
citizen. He is also the idealized image that represented the PRC from the mid to late 1960s and
early 1970s. Third, he becomes a revived image in the early 2010s, and this revival constitutes
another layer because it brings his image back from the socialist era and attempts to make it
relevant for a different period. Finally, these layers coalesce into the final strata of meaning
where he is simply an icon for the PRC and PLA itself. He, along with the layers of meaning he
carries, is recognizable to viewers. This process of citation and understanding forms the
beginnings of a language that brings about one vision of Chinese imagery and culture that
centers on the recognition of PRC imagery and the manipulation of this image.
While the citation is essential, the short does not simply replicate the visuality of Lei
Feng and its ideological baggage. There is, instead, a rearrangement of Lei Feng through the
“mecha,” the technological intervention into the persona and body. The mecha refers to the
mechanization of the robot or having robot-like qualities.
166
Mecha also refers to the
mechanizing of Lei Feng. In Mandarin, the characters call the robot “機器雷鋒” (jiqi leifeng),
which literally translates to “mechanical Lei Feng.” The English subtitles refer to the robot as
“Mecha-Lei Feng.” Referring to the robot as Mecha-Lei Feng is a shortening of the word, but

165
Virginia Kuhn, “The Rhetoric of Remix,” Transformative Works and Cultures 9, (2012).
166
M. Keith Booker, Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Cinema (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 186-187.
Chan Page 154 of 178

also embeds the character into a technological discourse. His body has never been and will not
be his own, but it represents the socialist state and its contemporary power. Yet, it is not simply
repeating and enforcing already existing narratives of said state, but the “mecha,” or the
mechanization of the body and image, interferes with the replication through its modification
of the body. Lei Feng is not present in the short in his socialist body but in a body that only
bears a slight resemblance to the figure. In this iteration of the short, Lei Feng is a visual
citation. His body is mechanical and bears very little trace of his socialist past.
This posthuman intervention into Lei Feng’s legacy highlights what Rachel C. Lee calls
“the political economy of Asiatic biologies.”
167
Citing Donna Haraway and Eric Hayot, Lee (2014)
explains that Chinese bodies are imbued with anxieties about the past, present, and future as
well as the animal and superhuman.
168
While Lee’s argument intervenes in discourse about the
Chinese body in Asian-American contexts, Mecha-Lei Feng is a figure that transforms the
politics of the body in Sinophone contexts. The short, through its mechanical intervention on
the image of Lei Feng, refuses and reframes the politics of Chineseness. Lei Feng is not present
in the short as a mouthpiece of the state, but he is instead modified and made visually
unfamiliar in his robotic body. Chineseness in this rendition moves away from singularized state
definition and moves into one that is able to be rearranged, and the intervention of technology
is not completely alien but an integral part of expression. In other words, Chineseness is not a
static conceptualization, but technological modification is integral to its formation and
recognition.

167
Rachel C. Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (New
York, New York University Press, 2014), 13.
168
Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America, 13-15.
Chan Page 155 of 178

The embodiment of GwanGong’s persona is also invoked at the end of the short. After
GwanGong defeats the alien, he disappears, and authorities deny his existence. The reference
to the Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” is made with the young man standing in front of the
tanks, holding a red plastic bag in his right hand, and refusing to move while the tanks close in
on him. The image of Tank Man has been kept alive through repurposing in China to avoid
censors.
169
In Hong Kong, the image of Tank Man is not censored and, therefore, can explicitly
remain associated with political dissent. Unlike the embodied presence of GwanGong in his
battle with the alien, the iteration of GwanGong with Tank Man does not change the latter’s
body to look more like a caricature of former. Tank Man remains himself with his white shirt
and black pants. It is also important to note that this manifestation of GwanGong does not
speak. Facing the tanks, the hint of the martial deity’s presence is a dominantly visual one.
Aurality falls away, and all that is left is the visual. The image of GwanGong here is hardly an
embodiment in any more conventional sense. He is a shadow and does not have his own
physical body or attributes. Furthermore, his presence is not even noticed until the camera
pulls away to reveal the massive shadow that extends beyond what is humanly possible for a
shadow. The shadow is in the shape of GwanGong. The citation of the martial deity remains on
the screen albeit in a different form. The only body on screen is Tank Man’s body, but
GwanGong quite literally overshadows him and imbues him with deified power. The
visualization of GwanGong as shadow further reinforces his ever-present power even without a
voice.
The juxtaposition of GwanGong as shadow with Tank Man points to the power of

169
Margaret Hillenbrand, “Remaking Tank Man in China.” Journal of Visual Culture 16, no.2 (2017): 129-131.
Chan Page 156 of 178

visuality when aurality and speech are not accessible modes of expression. GwanGong’s
shadow does not speak, but his shadow-body in terms of sheer size surpasses the tanks, and his
silence does not take away from his massive presence. It remains large and in charge as it
occupies half of the frame. Tank Man is also a silent figure both in this short and in the original
photographs and video from Beijing in 1989. In the 1989 video, Tank Man looks to be talking to
the tanks and soldiers, but his voice cannot be heard by the audience, rendering him a silent
figure. In the still images or photographs of Tank Man, he has no voice. It is only his body
standing in front of the tanks that endows him with the ability to speak. His gestures in both
film and photograph are silent ones, yet they do not foreclose his ability to speak and protest
during a time of insurmountable tension. This act of silent protest is a critique of the notion of
the center and the power that entails in relation to the construction of Chineseness. Tank Man
is not only an act of protest, but his standing in front of the tanks is a rejection of the PRC’s
command. While Tank Man points to the political rifts within China in that he is a visual signifier
for the critique of the state’s hegemony and power, the short’s invocation of him and affiliation
of him with GwanGong associates the landscape and conditions of Hong Kong with this break
from hegemonic power and expression of resistance.
While remixing iconic figures such as GwanGong and Tank Man is central in the short,
GVA’s work also rearranges a language of collaboration and Chineseness with people who play
a large role in helping GwanGong defeat the alien. GwanGong explains that he can accumulate
power and retain it through the belief of the people. These people are not simply an abstracted
entity that GwanGong mentions in his explanation, but there are visual examples of such
people on the screen. In a voice-over on an image of Wu in his embryonic state as the
Chan Page 157 of 178

embodiment of GwanGong, the deity says, “God? I’m no god...God exists only through the
imagination and wishful thinking of mortals...It gave me substance and the reason to be me.”
This quote points to how power is accumulated through various individual actions and their
beliefs, and more importantly, the acousmetre is not simply all-powerful and ubiquitous. Its
power comes from the belief that such power is imbued to the floating voice.
Alongside GwanGong’s explanation, a montage is presented to the viewers. In the first
scene of the montage, a couple is sitting at their kitchen table in a dimly lit apartment. With
their chopsticks and rice bowls in hand, their eyes are glued to the television. The camera then
pans to the TV, and it is revealed that the couple is watching the ongoing conflict between
GwanGong and the alien. The next scene of the montage is a nod to GwanGong’s relation to
brotherhood. This scene is shot in mainly close-ups. A shirtless man prays to GwanGong at a
makeshift altar with incense. The scene is filled with red light, and the way in which the man
prays to GwanGong is reminiscent of the triad ritual to solidify a sense of brotherhood. In the
following clip, a TV is once again the focus, but rather than current events, the television
features a GwanGong video game where GwanGong fights against antagonizing soldiers during
the Warring States period. The scene then cuts to the back of the television and pans up
showing a family of four standing in front of the TV holding incense sticks.
While the two scenes that include incense give a direct line to a sense of “conviction”
and belief in GwanGong, the short also includes a couple eating dinner together that do not
pray to GwanGong in any way. Their actions, however, emphasize a shared visuality and the
power of visuality in the universe created by the short. There is no incense or even a prayer
altar anywhere in the scene. The center of the frame is occupied by a rice cooker against a blue-
Chan Page 158 of 178

tiled wall. A few dishes are scattered across the table, and the couple sit on opposite sides of
the table. The guiding figure on the screen are the actors themselves staring, unblinkingly at the
television screen radiating a hypnotic blue light. In fact, their fixed gaze is a form of conviction
in this scene. The viewer is not shown the contents of the television until after the couple’s
reactions to the scene unfolding in city. The couple’s line of sight emphasizes their attention to
the television and the significance of what is happening on the television. The scene of the
couple engaged in their everyday routine turns into a scene about conviction because they are
shown to be drawn into believing in GwanGong’s existence. Their gaze indicates that seeing is
indeed believing.
Through these various forms of body language and embodied presences, a rhetoric of
Chineseness emerges from remixing familiar figures and rearranging daily occurrences, such as
having a meal in front of a television. The underlying assumption of these things is that they are
familiar and shared. The image of GwanGong, Lei Feng, and Tank Man all speak to a shared
Sinophone imaginary that is at once shared but also subversive in its intent. Moreover, these
images are not simply reproduced but are produced differently with technological interventions
or temporal displacement. These images are snapshots in the network of a shared set of images
and sequences. In other words, GwanGong’s existence is brought about through this collective
imagination that is not a blind following of state law and order but through their own
interventions. Their beliefs and rituals are rearrangements of that which is already familiar and
shared. This sharing of iconographies, language, and ritual is precisely what instantiates the
remixing of Chineseness. It is through the citation of controversial and mythological figures that
an essentialized image of Chineseness is dismantled.
Chan Page 159 of 178

Conclusion: Chineseness as Remixed Rhetoric
The scales of GwanGong’s body and presence are manipulated, destroyed, and reconstructed in
an alternative language of Chineseness. This reformulation of his legacy in Hong Kong is also
manifest in terms of his voice and language. Furthermore, GwanGong’s voice is both his own
and a voice made unfamiliar through technological intervention. Through the modulation of his
voice, his status as representation of a shared, historical icon is brought into question.
GwanGong’s voice is a disembodied presence. Although the short features an actor playing
GwanGong while he converses with Wu, GwanGong does not have a physical body of his own.
His voice is an acousmetre and only available through the technological modification process.
This modification comments on his disembodied existence where a historical figure is brought
into the present through technical imagination. This overlay of technology over the deity’s voice
also manipulates the language being spoken and moves it further away from a standard
Mandarin. The linguistic intonation of his voice, therefore, is not one that aligns with the
conventions set by the state or a state sanctioned Chinese language but is obviously inflected
by something other: a technological manipulation.
GwanGong is not the only subject of the intervention of technology. GwanGong is a
deity that is modified and given both physical presence and modulated voice. Lei Feng,
however, is a figure that is specific to the PRC rather than a recognizable supernatural icon. His
status as a model PLA soldier does not make him immune to technological manipulation. In
fact, he is made into an automaton. His body is not his own but one that is fully mechanical. The
mechanization of a PLA soldier and PRC icon subverts his memory as a human conforming to
Chan Page 160 of 178

the PRC’s ideologies and makes him into a figure that relies on the mechanization of the body
to keep him alive. On the one hand, this usage of his memory as a name, a Mecha-Lei Feng,
keeps the notion of the model worker or soldier alive and in public discourse. On the other
hand, the mechanization of his body disallows for his presence to be an ideological mouthpiece.
The Mecha-Lei Feng, therefore, deploys a familiar language and transforms the visual semiotics
from body of the model worker to mechanized robot.
The depicted body is not human and bears very little semblance to human physicality.
These bodies on screen of GwanGong and Lei Feng are remixed forms that are reinvented to
draw on collective memories. Their movements highlight the momentary pauses that
technology causes when it is deployed as distraction. Technology remixed into historical
iconography is a process that defamiliarizes a shared visual language of Chineseness by
introducing a modification of the body or voice. At the same time, such technological remixing
constructs an alternative language of Chineseness. These iterations of Chineseness highlight the
participatory form of language as a way to reformulate power and resistance to state defined
delineations of identity and politics.
Through the remixing familiar and shared images, the GVA Creative short series resists
censorship in favor of formulating a visual rhetoric of Chineseness. This rhetoric sheds light on
how the concept of “Chinese” in the Sinophone sphere is not simply controlled by the PRC, but
rhetoric as practice is participatory in the digital age. The presence and dominance of the PRC,
however, cannot be ignored, and in fact, the structures of censorship and control can be further
imposed by the PRC’s central government in Hong Kong. This threat of further repression is
apparent with the Tank Man image and makes the urgency for including irreverent, parodic,
Chan Page 161 of 178

and remixed citations of such images all the more apparent. Remixing Tank Man, GwanGong,
and Lei Feng constructs a visual language that pushes against a centralized image of
Chineseness, but the participation in constructing Chineseness cannot completely subvert the
authority of the PRC. Rather, the visual language constructed by those working in digital spaces
in Hong Kong creates an alternative and parallel discourse and rhetoric of Chineseness that
critiques a PRC-centered notion of “China” and what constitutes “Chinese” identities and
politics.

Chan Page 162 of 178

VI. Coda: Sinophone Bodies, Political Anxieties, and Biopolitics

The body has been the main topic of examination of this project. More specifically, I
argue that the Sinophone body as depicted in Hong Kong media navigates specific terrain in
regard to Hong Kong’s history and its contemporary politics. I have also argued for a new
genealogy of Hong Kong martial arts cinema that takes seriously the introduction of digital
media in Hong Kong’s cultural production. In order to account for the digital video on social
media and sharing platforms, cinema, martial arts film history, and its influence must be taken
into consideration. This project has examined the intersection between martial arts as a genre,
kinetic movement, depictions of Sinophone bodies, and the political circumstances of
Chineseness.
Yet, the body is a seemingly endless fountain of performative representation, metaphor,
and the like. Hong Kong is a particular case where it exists somewhere in between its own
political sovereignty and under the weight of the PRC. With the rise of China and its
involvement in the digital, how China regulates human bodies is particularly important. For
example, the social credit score that is being implemented in the PRC has large impacts on both
online and offline lives. The use of “Big Data” to regulate and predict behaviors has been a
contentious topic among scholars and netizens, especially when online habits and consumption
can translate into offline repercussions, such as travel bans among other ways the state can
regulate the movement of bodies within the PRC.
These anxieties have manifested in the digital with the rise of Online Big Movies (OBMs)
and the subsequent crackdown on this method of cinematic production. Many of these OBMs
Chan Page 163 of 178

use video game aesthetics alongside supernatural storylines to make low budget films that
would allow young or non-mainstream directors to share their works and gain internet
popularity as well as some financial benefits. As it became its own budding industry, the state
began to crack down on these modes of production in late 2017, and this internet crackdown
on media production continues. Now, video producers cannot stream their works online
without first passing government censors, and if video makers post videos that are not
approved, they are subject to consequences against their social credit scores. The regulation of
the body on and off line has significant consequences for media production and the way in
which bodies are depicted in cinema and on the internet. While Foucault mainly discusses how
bodies are patrolled through state enforced modes of discipline, such as the military or
sanitation systems, bodily control in the digital era has legacies in this mode of policing and
takes on new meaning with the implementation of new intrusions like the social credit system.
While this project has focused on the body in regulated and unregulated movements,
further studies might begin with the anxieties of the body when regulation falls apart.
Unregulated movement contributed to productive destruction for the films of Wong Kar-wai
and a remixing of Chineseness for the GVA Creative short, “GwanGong vs. Alien.” Such a
dichotomy of movement, however, is not the only model of bodily functions. Moreover, what
happens when the regulation of the body is lost, and unregulated movements are ignored? Or
when even unregulated movement is also made unavailable due to state censorship and other
forms of violence? To begin to answer these questions, I turn to discussions of waste and the
politics of excrement, the things that are left over from the body after the body performs its
communicative functions.
Chan Page 164 of 178

Rey Chow’s work on tears in cultural production more specifically is the starting point
when thinking about bodily waste, such as blood and excreta, and the politics behind such acts
of bodily release.
170
For example, when looking at the various manifestations of vomit in 1980s
exploitation horror films, such as Devil Fetus (1983) and Centipede Horror (1982), the inducing
of vomit usually from a supernatural devil curse eventually leads to the death of the individuals.
These types of films feature an imagining a body that is itself its means of destruction. In other
words, these bodies are destroyed from the inside out, and perhaps signifying impending
political fears. Overall, this second project is one that emerges from this dissertation. They both
involve the bodies, but the body is imagined in various capacities. Movement as language takes
place when spoken language cannot be accessed, and the visual presents a lexicon that can
reach a variety of communities due to already shared codes of cultural practice however
tenuous as such a connection may be.

170
Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
Chan Page 165 of 178

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VIII. Films Cited
2046 (2004), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
A Touch of Zen (1971), dir. King Hu.
As Tears Go By (1988), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
Ashes of Time (1994), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
The Assassin (2015), dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
The Battle of Dingjunshan (1905), dir. Ren Jingfeng.
The Big Boss (1971), dir. Lo Wei.
Bruce Lee in GOD (2000), dir. Toshizaku Ohgushi.
Chungking Express (1994), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
Come Drink with Me (1966), dir. King Hu.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), dir. Ang Lee.
Days of Being Wild (1990), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
Dragon Inn (1967), dir. King Hu.
Fallen Angels (1995), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
The Fate of Lee Khan (1973), dir. King Hu.
Fist of Fury (1972), dir. Lo Wei.
The Game of Death (1972), dir. Bruce Lee.
The Golden Gate Girl (1941), dir. Esther Eng Kwan Man Ching.
The Grandmaster (2013), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
“GwanGong vs. Alien” part 1 & part 2 (2013), dir. GVA Creative.
Happy Together (1997), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
Hero (2002), dir. by Zhang Yimou.
“Hong Kong Will Be Destroyed After 33 Years” (2014), dir. GVA Creative.
In the Mood for Love (2000), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
The Kid (1950), dir. Fung Fung.
Legend of the Mountain (1979), dir. King Hu.
Lust, Caution (2007), dir. Ang Lee.
Marlowe (1969), dir. Paul Bogart.
Chan Page 178 of 178

My Blueberry Nights (2007), dir. Wong Kar-wai.
Painted Skin (1993), dir. King Hu.
Raining in the Mountain (1979), dir. King Hu.
The Swordsman (1990), dir. King Hu.
The Valiant Ones (1975), dir. King Hu.
The Way of the Dragon (1972), dir. Bruce Lee.

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Creator Chan, Melissa Mei-Lin (author)

Core Title Choreographing the Sinophone body: martial movements and embodied languages in Hong Kong media

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 04/24/2021

Defense Date 03/08/2019

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Tag Body,Bruce Lee,China,Chineseness,digital media,film,Hong Kong,King Hu,Language,Martial arts,movement,OAI-PMH Harvest,People's Republic of China,Sinophone,Wong Kar-wai,YouTube

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Advisor Bernards, Brian (committee chair), Berry, Michael (committee member), Choe, Youngmin (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

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