Sat, Apr 13, 2002 - Page 11 News List

Keeping martial arts alive in print

A local publisher of martial arts texts is helping preserve several martial art forms by searching for and reprinting ancient texts

By Brian Kennedy  /  CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

In addition to reprinting older Chinese martial arts books and developing the new integrated teaching materials, Liu also publishes Taiwan Wu Lin magazine (武林), which is Taiwan's premier martial arts journal. He also hosts an annual historical martial arts book and film show. This show gives the public the opportunity to see many rare martial arts texts and many rarely seen films and videos of past martial arts masters in action.

As for the future of the martial arts, Liu said that "young people like martial arts, think it is a good thing, they fantasize a lot about it from movies and computer games but few of them really learn martial arts, and even if they learn they are deterred by the hard work." For this reason, he believes that much that is of value in traditional Chinese martial arts is at risk of being lost. In modern times the martial arts are being pulled out of their traditional cultural context. The result being that much valuable information is being lost to modern practitioners. Liu's is an attempt to place the Chinese martial arts back into their cultural context.

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