Hong Kong as Method of The Grandmaster: Wing Chun, Hong Kong Film to Hong Kong Culture

I undertake a close reading of Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster (2013) to outline how a somatechnics of the body in wing chun, a form of martial art, provides a way to understand ‘Hong Kong as method’. The film shows how the wing chun pragmatism is about bodily positions conceived of as outcomes that follow action. The Grandmaster is based on Ip Man’s (1893–1972) life story. He belongs to a generation of post-1949 émigrés who do not treat Hong Kong as their home. Making do in the everyday is their survival ‘tactic’. Ip would see the postwar Hong Kong everyday as gong wu (martial arts world), which literally means ‘river and lake’. This might help him to develop the pragmatism of wing chun. We discuss first how wing chun might be read as method of survival at least, and then how its wisdom is immersed in everyday Hong Kong. From the understanding of kung fu ( wing chun in particular), we explore a form of knowledge production through ‘Hong Kong as method’. We discuss how Ip, through inheriting the wing chun tradition, also embraces Hong Kong’s everyday culture; the latter is also reflected in its filmmaking culture, as seen in the process of impromptu practice which Wong inherits. The discussion of The Grandmaster extends from wing chun and Hong Kong filmmaking to Hong Kong’s ordinary culture. Hong Kong as method cannot be clearly articulated. If Hong Kong as method can be articulated, it is, to borrow from Bruce Lee, Ip’s last disciple, seen as a ‘be water’ method.