***I am current on the road for the annual Martial Arts Studies conference at Cardiff University in the UK. As soon as I return home I will be posting a full report of the event and sharing the text and slides from my keynote (titled “Show, Don’t Tell: Making Martial Arts Studies Matter.”) In…
Category: Pop Culture Kung Fu
Imagining Ip Man: Globalization and the Growth of Wing Chun Kung Fu
***I am current on the road for the annual Martial Arts Studies conference at Cardiff University in the UK. As soon as I return home I will be posting a full report of the event and sharing the text and slides from my keynote (titled “Show, Don’t Tell: Making Martial Arts Studies Matter.”) In…
Anime and the Education of a Martial Artist
Introduction Occasionally life takes a turn and one’s personal martial arts training gets moved to the back burner. The last couple of weeks have been like that as my wife and I have been engulfed in a seemingly unending move. It certainly could have been worse as on paper it was a…
Chinese Martial Arts in the News: April 24, 2017: Southern Kung Fu, Taijiquan Heritage and Boxing for Survival
Introduction Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News!” Its great to be back at my keyboard after spending the last week and half on other projects. I managed to finish the draft of my chapter and am looking forward to posting some new material and guest posts over the next few weeks before…
Chinese Martial Arts in the News: March 27th 2017: Taijiquan, Ip Man 4 and Things that You Just Can’t Make Up
Introduction Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News.” This is a semi-regular feature here at Kung Fu Tea in which we review media stories that mention or affect the traditional fighting arts. In addition to discussing important events, this column also considers how the Asian hand combat systems are portrayed in…
Doing Research (10): Trying to Think Inside the Box with Paul Bowman
Introduction Welcome to the tenth entry in our series of guest posts titled “Doing Research.” If you missed the first essay by D. S. Farrer (which provides a global overview of the subject), the second by Daniel Mroz (how to select a school or teacher for research purposes), the third by Jared Miracle…
Remembering Yim Wing Chun, the Boxer Rebellion and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
What at first appears new is often something remembered. The human mind has trouble categorizing and finding meaning in anything that is truly unique or alien. Good storytellers know that originality is not always a virtue. The construction of meaning is rooted primarily in what we feel to be familiar. The…
A Year in the Chinese Martial Arts: How the Chinese Martial Arts Amazed and Surprised Us in 2016
Happy New Year! New Years is always a good time to sit back and reflect on recent events. Of course it is hard not to note that public opinion on 2016 (at least here in the United States) has been decidedly mixed. Still, it has been an interesting year for the Chinese…
Interview with the No Wax Needed Podcast
I recently had a chance to sit down with Itamar Zadoff who runs the “No Wax Needed” podcast. Itamar is one of the up and coming martial arts studies scholars who I had the pleasure to meet at our conference in Cardiff earlier this year. (You can see a short interview that he did…
Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Lightsaber: Fetishism and Material Culture in Martial Arts Studies
“The lightsaber has become an important touchstone, both within the films and within our culture…They serve as a source of identification and identity. They are the ultimate commodity: a nonexistent object whose replicas sell for hundreds of dollars. This is not bad for something that defies the laws of physics and cannot and does…
Theory and the Growth of Knowledge – Or Why You Probably Can’t Learn Kung Fu From Youtube
Becoming Ip Man, in all the Wrong Ways On a Saturday morning in 2011 I found myself running an “open session” for my Sifu’s Wing Chun school. The weekday classes were always structured affairs in which learners worked their way through an extensive curriculum centered on one of the various forms in the…
Multimedia Wing Chun: Learning and Practice in the Age of YouTube
By George Jennings (Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK) and Anu Vaittinen (Newcastle University, UK) Reference to conference presentation: Jennings, G. & Vaittinen, A. (2016). Mediated transformation: Interconnections between embodied training and multimedia resources in Wing Chun. Paper presented at the 2nd International Martial Arts Studies Conference, Cardiff University, UK, 19 July…
