More recently, Donnie Yen, Keanu Reeves (in the Matrix, where he was trained by renowned fight choreographer Yuen Woo Ping and a team of wushu athletes), and even Michael Jai White, who trained with the Jackie Chan stunt team. Despite being a relatively unknown martial art, today’s cinema features some iconic wushu-trained actors such as Bruce Lee (the most famous one), Jet Li, Jackie Chan. These ancient styles range as far back as 2,000 years and have been preserved and modernized for objective judging in modern competition. Today, it is a highly structured performance art that draws from traditional Chinese styles such as Shaolin quan from Shaolin temple, Taijiquan, Hung Gar, and so many more. Kung fu, or gongfu in Mandarin, is actually based on the Chinese concept of hard work or excellence, but we tend to use them somewhat interchangeably, with gongfu usually being used in the United States to refer to the more grounded traditional styles.įounded in the late 1800s as an attempt to preserve Chinese martial arts culture and give them a structured, public foundation for people to practice, the contemporary sport of wushu has been a staple of Chinese cultural exports and is practiced by more than a million people across the globe. Wushu is the Chinese term for martial arts, with Wu meaning martial and shu meaning the art of.
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