Rising from Base-Entities: Wong Kar-wai’s Jianghu as Method

Abstract

Asia rises when Asia engages in multiple inter-referencing. The prerequisite is to first identify and excavate the “base-entity” of a culture, which has to be overcome for transcendence (Chen 2010). However, the temptation to indulge in enunciating such base-entity is enormous. The rise of China seems to signify an insidious, slippery regression into essentialising such base-entity and thereby muting the multitude. In view of this, this presentation aims to reveal that Wong Kar-wai’s career is a struggle to transcend such regression. His status as an era-defining auteur resides in how he masterfully uses his jianghu as method to reimagine the identity and subjectivity of the people in Hong Kong and beyond. Before The Grandmaster(2013), Wong’s jianghu had always been an allegory of the nativization of a fetishized identity. A lost love, usually as a primordial, archetypal and absent femme fatale, represents a perfect, imaginary past that the protagonists want to repeat but in vain. In 2013, Wong woke up from the obsession with such a base-entity and realized that the wushu jianghu, the martial art universe in Ip Man’s time, could be a method to reimagine Hong Kong, beyond the present deadlock that involves seemingly opposing forces, such as localization, globalization, neo-liberalization and mainlandization. In the inheritance of different martial art traditions during troubled times, Wong sees Hong Kong’s vitality in cultural hybridization. After the long years of 'chasing la femme fatale', Wong enunciates an identity of essence-transcending family resemblance.