Respect is paid when Sammo Hung (洪金寶) lumbers down the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui, the neighborhood where he first learned martial arts as a boy.
Women ask for his autograph at a cafe where he has his black coffee. Laborers stripped to the waist in the summer heat crowd against the edge of their truck and wave. Tourists snap photos as he strolls along the Avenue of the Stars — a sort of Hollywood Walk of Fame here — where his hand prints are between Jackie Chan’s (成龍) and Brigitte Lin’s (林青霞).
Not particularly well-known among mainstream international audiences, Hung, 58, is known as the “Big Brother” of the Hong Kong kung fu film. The famously hefty actor did not go the Hollywood route that Chan has pursued but has stayed mainly in Asia, where he has directed, produced, choreographed or acted in about 200 movies. He is best known as a fight choreographer, working behind the scenes with stars like Chan and John Woo (吳宇森) and playing an integral role in the development of the kung fu genre.
That earned him a lifetime achievement award last week at the New York Asian Film Festival, which runs through Thursday. It is showing four of his works: Eastern Condors (1987), a darkly humorous Vietnam War-era film that is said to have been an influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds; Kung Fu Chefs (功夫廚神) (2009), a comedy; and the two Ip Man (葉問) movies (2008 and 2010), based on the life of Ip Man, a grand master of wing chun (詠春) kung fu who taught Bruce Lee (李小龍), and for which Hung did the fight choreography. A sold-out screening of Ip Man 2 opened the festival.
The entertainment business runs in Hung’s family. His grandmother, Chin Tsi-Ang (錢似鶯), was one of the first sword-wielding martial-arts actresses, and his grandfather was a director.
Born Hung Kam-bo in 1952, he was trained in the old Peking Opera School tradition, in which parents sent young children to live on campus and to apprentice under a master who taught them martial arts, acrobatics, singing and dancing.
“I was never good at school and was always fighting in the streets,” Hung said. “So they sent me to learn to fight.”
When he was 9, he was sent to be trained in the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood of Kowloon, where he met a younger student named Chan Kong-sang, who became Jackie Chan. Under the school’s management they became child stars in a performing troupe.
“We woke early in the morning and worked until 11 at night,” Hung said. “There was a small, square wooden stool, and we had to do a handstand on it for an hour. Of course they beat the children. I lived there for seven years.”
Decades later, in 1988, Hung played his former master in Painted Faces (七小福), a drama that depicts the boys’ spartan life. “Our real suffering,” he said, “was much worse than what we put in the movie.”
Hung said he did not learn kung fu specifically until after he left school. He also spent years studying a variety of fighting styles from China and other Asian nations.
He established himself as an action director, choreographing the elaborate combat scenes for which Hong Kong films are known and sometimes fighting himself. He plays the portly Shaolin monk, for example, whom Bruce Lee battles in the opening of Enter the Dragon (龍爭虎斗) (1973).
Through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s Hung was involved in scores of movies, which the Hong Kong studio system was churning out quickly and cheaply. He specialized in the B-films so beloved by audiences here.
Hong Kong cinema began developing its own look and moving away from stylized Mandarin-language costume dramas. Filmmakers started using bawdy humor, urban settings, tight hand-to-hand combat shots and the rough Cantonese of the streets.
“Kung fu films have to move with the rest of the world,” Hung said. “You couldn’t keep on doing sword fights in historic films. People wanted superheroes. They wanted something fast and new.”
From 1998 to 2000 he starred in Martial Law, a CBS prime-time TV drama, in which he played a kung fu-fighting Chinese cop.
Like everyone in the Hong Kong movie business, Hung is doing more work in China, as it opens up and as its entertainment industry grows. That said, he noted that “the local Hong Kong flavor is getting lost in some films.”
“I wish there were more kung fu films,” he said. “They are a part of our culture. But there are no young new stars out there. Who’s making a new generation of kung fu films now? If all young actors want is to star in romances, what do they need to learn kung fu for? The sex scenes?”
Hung’s three sons — Timmy, Jimmy and Sammy — have acted in various projects with him, but he said he was not going to push them. “I want them to see the world for themselves,” he said.
Nor did he see the film festival award as the culmination of his career. Once the festival ends, he plans to return home to Hong Kong, he said, and start shooting again.
“I’m not quite ready for a lifetime achievement award,” he said. “It makes it sound like I’m going to retire soon, and I feel like I’ve just started.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist