Fists of Tranquility: Review of Martial Arts Ecology, by Wayne Wong

Martial Arts Ecology: Aesthetics, Philosophy and Cinematic Mediation, by Wayne Wong. Edinburgh University of Press, 2026. 304pp.

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At an early point in a 1996 assessment of the development and evolution of film studies, David Bordwell ruefully reminisces about how the discipline was once such “a small, disreputable area” of academic inquiry that “a bright undergraduate” in the late 1960s would have been able to read “all of the important English-language film books over summer vacation.”1 This is even more amusing to think of now, in 2026, at a time when it would be difficult to imagine even trying to read in one summer all of the important English-language film books published in the last year. To be sure, this is a great sign. Film studies is now such a vibrant area of academic inquiry that the number of monographs and edited collections being published annually on all sorts of films, filmmakers, genres, time periods, and national cinemas is almost inconceivable. Unfortunately, martial arts cinema sadly remains “a small, disreputable area” of study in our discipline, and it is entirely possible for an interested scholar to read all of the important English-language books on it in a single summer.

In the 1970s, in the midst of the “kung fu craze” kick-started by the Hong Kong martial arts films produced by Shaw Brothers Studio and Golden Harvest, made by the likes of King Hu, Chang Cheh, Lo Wei, Chor Yuen, Lau Kar-leung, and Yuen Woo-ping, and starring the likes of Cheng Pei-pei, Jimmy Wang Yu, Lo Lieh, Bruce Lee, Angela Mao, Gordon Liu, and Jackie Chan, critical histories were written by Verina Glaessner2 and Marilyn D. Mintz.3 However, it would quite literally take another century (likely due to the new cachet enjoyed by martial arts cinema at the start of the 21st century thanks to such international sensations as The Matrix [1999] and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [2000]) before martial arts cinema became a proper object of academic study. Following important early work by Stephen Teo4 and Bordwell himself,5 the 21st century has seen a positive uptick in scholarly interest in martial arts cinema – scholars like Leon Hunt,6 Meaghan Morris,7 Paul Bowman,8 Sabrina Qiong Yu,9 Man-Fing Yip,10 Luke White,11 Lauren Steimer,12 and Gary Bettinson13 have contributed important monographs and edited collections14 for scholars interested in this unique realm of action cinema.15 The newest addition to the list of scholars doing important work on action and martial arts cinema is Wayne Wong, whose 2026 monograph Martial Arts Ecology: Aesthetics, Philosophy and Cinematic Mediation stands out as one of the most innovative, provocative, and fruitful considerations ever published on martial arts as a phenomenon that crisscrosses time periods, cultures, and media.

In this groundbreaking new book, Wong makes clear very early that even though martial arts cinema is his jumping-off point and primary focus across the various chapters, his prevailing interest is in martial arts, and his goal is to track martial arts “across different media forms” (p. 10): Inspired by Thomas Lamarre’s work on Japanese anime,16 Wong analyzes everything from Hong Kong and Hollywood films to animation and video games. In addition to making historical claims pertaining to the development and evolution of film genres and media technologies on the one hand and the vicissitudes of martial arts practices and philosophies on the other, Wong’s main purpose in his book is to argue for a new way of approaching martial arts as an embodied practice and an aesthetic trope. To his credit, based on his unprecedented ability to marshal insights from media theory and aesthetic criticism, ancient and modern philosophy (both “East” and “West”), and training in various martial arts, Wong’s approach is refreshingly novel and impressively unique. In the hopes of adding a new conceptual tool to the toolboxes of scholars interested in martial arts cinema – and not to contradict or in any other way criticize prior approaches that prioritized issues of cinematic realism, nationalism, gender, and so on, all of which can be productively integrated into his framework – Wong lucidly works through important tenets of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism in order to conceptualize what he terms martial ideation.

Chen Zhen (Bruce Lee) reaches a new combative plane in Fist of Fury

As chronicled by Wong, the concept of ideation, or yi, can be found in Chinese aesthetic philosophy, where scholars have regarded it as “the highest artistic aspiration in traditional Chinese art forms such as poetry and painting,” in which artists seek “a unity between the observer and the observed” in order to “evoke a transcendent state that goes beyond mere representation to capture the essence and ethos of a scene or emotion”; and in European philosophy, where in the context of phenomenology Edmund Husserl used it to anchor consciousness and subjectivity (p. 4). Historically, yi has been translated into English in a variety of contexts and in a variety of ways as idea, emotion, intention, or meaning. Significantly, all of these concepts serve to bracket a single, stable, identifiable thing (as in this idea or that emotion). For Wong – “crucially,” as he rightly emphasizes – his conception of ideation “is not a static concept” (p. 271); it delineates a process, one that is unique to every individual and that varies by context but that always has as its endpoint a transcendent experience of tranquility. But what relevance or utility, Wong knows his readers will wonder, can such a concept have for the purposes of studying martial arts? That is, what sense is there to a conception of specifically martial ideation? On the one hand, is martial ideation not a contradiction in terms? Is physical combat not antithetical to tranquility? On the other hand, is martial arts cinema not a primitive, juvenile cinematic arena in which limbs flail about, bodies smash into each other, and copious amounts of blood spill out for the sole purpose of “mindless entertainment”? Is martial arts cinema not antithetical to such intellectualizing (to say nothing of animation and video games)? On the contrary, Wong powerfully demonstrates the philosophical profundity, ideological salience, aesthetic ingenuity, and emotional power of martial arts cinema. Indeed, he contends that such iconic tropes and images as “the poised hero awaiting battle or the controlled breath preceding explosive action” are more than mere generic convention – they convey meanings, conjure emotions, and invite thoughts that transcend genre (if they do not transcend art itself) to “encapsulate a profound exploration of balance, mastery, and introspection” at once psychological, emotional, physical, and even spiritual (p. 5).

For as fascinating as Wong’s philosophical argument is regarding the fecundity of ideation as a cross-cultural concept, he does not leave it as idle speculation; rather, he shrewdly and comprehensively details places where without recourse to the concept our hopes of understanding and appreciating the depths of many of the most iconic sequences of martial arts in media history will be dashed. In films like Fist of Fury (1972), The Matrix, Ip Man (2008), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) among many other cinematic, televisual, and gamic examples, there are moments that Wong finds curious, moments that are frankly inexplicable from within existing critical/theoretical frameworks. What is happening when Bruce Lee’s character in Fist of Fury begins hypnotically waving his arms in circular patterns in the midst of a fight with Robert Baker’s character, a famous sequence that features disorienting shot/reverse-shot editing and handheld cinematography, disconcerting slow-motion and motion trails, and a dissonant cymbal roll (p. 112)? Or how about in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves’s character can suddenly see “in” or “through” the computer simulation and becomes capable of calmy dispatching enemy “agents” with ease (pp. 168–169)? What is the significance of the cross-cutting in the final fight scene in Ip Man when Donnie Yen’s character is effortlessly executing techniques in the heat of combat during which we see flashbacks to his character practicing the techniques in training (pp. 146–147)? How is Michelle Yeoh’s character able to quiet her mind and calm her nerves enough in Everything Everywhere All at Once to successfully navigate the multiverse and transform from a woman struggling to find harmony with her family while running a laundromat, caring for her cruel father, raising a resentful daughter, and on the verge of divorce with a neglected husband into a fierce warrior capable of saving humanity and reconciling the paradoxes and contradictions of human being (pp. 181–191)?

Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) fights for her family in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Wong provides astute and insightful readings of these films from a variety of perspectives, and he extends his insights to considerations of animated features like Kung Fu Panda (2008) and video games like Sifu (2022), but the central argument is that in key moments of martial arts action we see how and when “tranquility prevails amid chaos” (p. 1). For as useful as it is to approach martial arts cinema with Bordwell’s “pause-burst-pause” pattern as a structuring principle for fight choreography17 or Hunt’s tripartite framework of “authenticity” as a way to understand (and either compliment or criticize) mediatized martial arts,18 we seem to lack the ability to make sense of what exactly is happening when characters in the midst of extreme (often life-threatening) chaos successfully tap into a different headspace, or enter a new emotional register, or reach a new spiritual plane. Such verbiage comes close to, but does not accurately capture, what Wong allows us finally to register and begin to think through by virtue of the concept of martial ideation.

This, however, is merely Wong’s opening salvo. Once armed with the concept of martial ideation, Wong treats his readers to dazzling tours of martial arts in history, across media, and even through philosophy. Perhaps the greatest weapon in his analytic arsenal is not his extraordinary command of the philosophical ideas and arguments that inform the histories of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism – and this is saying a lot since his command of these ideas and arguments is unprecedented in the history of media studies and allows him to thematically explore myriad films with reference to Confucian “humaneness” (ren), Daoist “nothingness” (wu), and Buddhist “mindfulness” (guan) – but his familiarity with the martial arts themselves – with such fighting styles as Hung Gar (hongjia), the renowned style taught and practiced by Kwan Tak-hing’s character Wong Fei-hung in the landmark mid-20th-century series of films chronicling the exploits of the legendary Guangdong folk hero (pp. 59–91); Jeet Kune Do (jiequandao), the idiosyncratic, syncretic style of combat invented by Bruce Lee and the tenets of which he elaborates in such classic fight scenes as the Roman Colosseum duel with Chuck Norris’s character in The Way of the Dragon (1972) and the pagoda battles with characters played by Dan Inosanto, Ji Han-jae, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his unfinished film The Game of Death (pp. 92–127); and Wing Chun (yongchun), a form of kung fu that will forever be associated with Ip Man, the real-life teacher of Bruce Lee who has now become a cinematic icon thanks to the popularity of the series of films starring Donnie Yen as Ip Man directed by Wilson Yip (Ip Man [2008], Ip Man 2 [2010], Ip Man 3 [2015], Ip Man 4: The Finale [2019]) and Wong Kar-wai’s arthouse actioner The Grandmaster (2013) featuring Tony Leung as Ip Man (pp. 128–160) – which allows him to see things no previous critics or scholars have seen and to explain things to his readers that they may never have been able to understand without his critical guidance.

In the course of his analyses of Kwan Tak-hing’s Wong Fei-hung films, Wong does not merely analyze the films and Kwan’s performances as embodying Confucian principles, he also connects martial arts techniques to philosophical ideals in Confucianism and ethical tenets cherished by Kwan’s character, be it traditional Lion Dancing or the tiger-crane fist and the iron-wire fist. In the course of his analyses of Bruce Lee’s choreography and aesthetics, Wong does not merely elucidate Lee’s philosophical background and his interest in Daoism, he also connects Lee’s combat philosophy to his embodied and cinematic practice of Jeet Kune Do, from his utilization of circular footwork in his fight scenes to his innovative aesthetics once he started directing for The Way of the Dragon and The Game of Death. And in the course of his analyses of fight scenes featuring Ip Man as played by both Donnie Yen and Tony Leung, Wong does not merely build off of recent work in film studies on the probative value of Buddhism,19 he also argues for a Buddhist understanding of the importance in Wing Chun of “listening (ting)” and “bridging (qiao),” or the ability to “attun[e] to the dynamics of energy (qi) and force (li)” in combat (p. 138), which ability is cultivated most notably in the practice of “sticky hands” (chi sao) and which is thematized across all of the Ip Man films just as the ethical principles of virtue and adaptability are thematized in Kwan’s and Lee’s films.

Ip Man (Donnie Yen) shows his enemy mercy in Ip Man

Most impressively of all, for as much new ground as Wong breaks in Martial Arts Ecology – and I do not want to undersell this; Wong’s book breaks new ground at so many points and in so many ways that the book is a must-read for anyone interested in martial arts (in) media, and certainly for anyone considering writing anything about martial arts (in) media – this is an oddly humble book. By this, I mean that Wong’s authoritative expertise in such diverse fields as Chinese philosophy, martial arts practice, and aesthetic criticism by no means closes off conversation and debate. Quite the contrary; I found myself so excited to think of additional films that Wong did not discuss that seem to fit his ideational framework.20 I was also eager to contemplate where some of his ideas seemed questionable21 or where some of his analyses did not match my understandings of the films in question.22 Sometimes, agreement can make one feel like there is nothing left to say, while disagreement can sometimes make one feel like engagement would be fruitless. It is one of the great qualities of Wong’s writing that neither is ever the case. At every turn, Martial Arts Ecology is a genuinely inviting text: the author invites each reader to accompany him on his breathtaking tour of media history, philosophy, and martial arts, and if by the end one feels like they have earned a black belt under Wong’s tutelage, this feeling comes with the knowledge that, to riff on Bruce Lee’s character’s words to a student in Enter the Dragon (1973), in which he famously says “It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that Heavenly glory,” Wong has pointed us to the moon – it is now our job to explore all that Heavenly glory.

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.