King Hu's A Touch of Zen

The aesthetics of mythical violence in Hong Kong action films

“…A Touch of Zen features the figure of the xia nü (female knight-errant) in a world otherwise dominated by men. I have more fully discussed the feminism of the xia nü figure in A Touch of Zen elsewhere (Teo 2007) and will not repeat myself here. What concerns us in this article is the mythical violence that sustains the feminism of the xia nü myth.…”

Religion in cinema : Buddhism and Taoism in popular films through a jungian lens

“…King Hu staged his fight scenes like ballets and the ritualized actions of Peking Opera (Costanzo, 2014, p.58). Teo (2007) observes that A Touch of Zen still leaves traces on contemporary cinema in films such as Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004). The concepts of Zen are seen in the artistry that delivers a level of "universal transcendence" (Teo, 2007, p.5).…”

“…In addition, King Hu, whose wuxia tradition Ang Lee followed to a large extent in Crouching Tiger, portrayed strong female warriors demonstrating the heroism generally embodied by male warriors during the 1960s and 1970s in his Come Drink with Me and A Touch of Zen (Szeto, 2011, p.42-43). Teo (2007) highlights that King Hu's A Touch of Zen is different from the preceding films of the wuxia genre as it is "too slow" (p.7) and it is unconventional in its treatment of the movie by putting focus on "the female knight", "the ambiguous sexuality" and "the mysticism of Zen" (p.15), and he attributes King Hu's greatest legacy in the martial arts cinema as the "popularization of the female knight-errant figure as a revitalizing heroine in both the wuxia and kung fu forms" (p.146). Costanzo reads Jen's struggle for freedom as a female in the traditional Qing society as the "conflict between individual happiness and social responsibility, between the Taoist pursuit of one's nature ("the way") and the communal obligations of Confucianism" (Costanzo, 2014, p.98).…”