Blogging Donnie Yen: remaking the martial arts body as a cyber-intertext

This chapter inquires Donnie Yen’s martial arts body in blogosphere. It analyses that Yen’s kinetic body, often the focus of bloggers’ interest, is not only the corporeal entity that appears in individual films he starred in and become famous for, such as SPL: Sha Po Lang, Ip Man, and Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen. It is also an outcome of sundry participatory forces, bridging the martial arts body to the elements in extra-diegetic settings such as Hollywood sci-fi genre, martial arts culture and hip hop culture. It, hence, appears as an intertextual phenomenon which bloggers keep reworking and renegotiating Chinese nationalism in tandem with cyber legends of Ip Man, Bruce Lee, and Chen Zhen. This chapter also pursues to discuss how the Chinese body of Yen is further questioned and complicated when users mix symbolic components drawn from Chinese or non-Chinese systems, and how the offscreen existence of Yen shows both resonance and incongruity to his screen personae complicating his martial arts image. This chapter ultimately argues that these new forms allow bloggers to revisit, represent, and contend the ethnic representation of Yen.