Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER

Ms. WU Helena Yuen Wai                           (Hong Kong University)        
email: <wuhelena <wuhelena@hku.hk>

"What is New About Wuxia Pian?: An Exploration of the Transnational Re/Invention of Wuxia Pian in the 21st Century"

Wuxia pian is always a popular genre in Chinese cinema well-liked by the mass public and, at the same time, widely discussed by the critics and the academia. From the early invention of the film genre in the 50/60s led by Kinghu, Zhang Che and their contempories to its reintroduction to the global audience in the millennium by Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee and others, looking at the in-between process of re/making, re/inventing and recycling wuxia pian allows us to think about how a heavily localized text can be transmitted across the transnational borders and be perceived and engaged in the global context. At the same time, the paper also asks whether the constant remaking and adaptation of wuxia pian is a genuine renewal of the genre or just a mere replication of the earlier tradition, especially when the idea of “newness” is always heavily (or overly) emphasized as seen from trends including but not limited to Tsui’s self-remake of his Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (新蜀山劍俠, 1983) as The Legend of Zu (蜀山傳, 2001), Wilson Yip’s version of A Chinese Ghost Story (倩女幽魂, 2011) after Ching Siu-Tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story series (倩女幽魂, 1987, 1990, 1991) and even Stephen Chow’s repacking of the wuxia pian elements in his Shaolin Soccer (少林足球, 2001) and even Kung Fu Hustle (功夫, 2004). Coming to Peter Chan’s latest production Wuxia(武俠, 2011), which claims to have a view to alter the entire notion of wuxia, and Derek Kwok and Clement Cheng’s Gallants (打擂台, 2010), which is partly invested on the stardom of a few veteran martial arts film actors and partly invented by the (re)imagination of the wuxia genre in the urban space, the paper also tries to explore how the contrasting dual effects of newness and tradition are at work in the re/production and the re/interpretation of wuxia pian in a transnational scenario within and beyond the Chinese-speaking community, with a view to provoke more thoughts at the question “what is new about wuxia pian?”.