The 2nd Hong Kong

In response to the economic recession, someone proposed to build a Bruce Lee museum to attract more travelers to Hong Kong. Whether this proposal can rescue Hong Kong’s tourist industry remains a question. But ironically, Bruce Lee as an icon utilized by someone to save the “prosperous Hong Kong image” becomes a focus at the moment when this image is seriously blurred.
In Ashes of Time (1994), a film adapted from Jin Yong’s substantially influential martial arts novel the nexus between martial arts and the Chinese-Hong Kong identity is screened by means of blurred images, so long as the word “screened” is taken in its double sense. If Bruce Lee can be considered as a Hong Kong-Chinese-Asian icon owing to the use of martial arts in his films as the symbol of nationalism and identity, Ashes of Time shelters such symbols from view in which energetic punches and kicks can in no way be seen in cine(ma) as Bruce Lee practiced. And if the impact of Jin Yong’s martial arts novel in Hong Kong as well as other contemporary Chinese societies and the nationalism they suggest can in any sense be symbolic in Ashes of Time, it is in its unrecognizable adaptation and un-Chinese costumes that make Jin Yong and martial arts become what they are not, in cine(ma), in the scene, at the moment when they are seen. Jin Yong is there only in the film title and the characters’ names. Any nationalism and identities that can be claimed under the Hong Kong-Chinese-Asian labels are turned into blurred images, fragmented actions, condemned plots and dispersive situations.

The 3rd Hong Kong

In Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995), the scattered moving lights within the images shot by hand-held camera set a Hong Kong in motion along these images of the seen/scene. In Chungking Express, the mysterious woman disguised under a blonde wig (played by Lin Ching-Hsia), and those who betrayed her, search and want to kill each other along Chungking Mansions and the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway. In Chungking Express, Faye (played by Faye Wong) and a cop 633 (played by Tony Leung) develop their play of hide and seek in the airport district where they can often meet each other. This turns out to be a year long departure and waiting, and when they meet again, they begin to create another boarding pass to somewhere else. In Fallen Angels, love, to the killer (played by Leon Lai) and his agent (played by Michelle Li), is incommunicable. The dumb He Qiwu (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) can only communicate with his father through videotape images after his father died. All these failed communications evince a city in motion, where lost subjects can by no means be stabilized under any network or identity, especially under the one called “Hong Kong.”

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