Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive

[GeneChing]

You have to follow the link to see the embedded vid. It's kinda cool. :cool:


Researchers are using 3D motion capture to document kung fu before it disappears (http://qz.com/812715/kung-fu-masters-are-working-with-researchers-to-use-3d-motion-capture-to-document-their-art-before-it-disappears/)
WRITTEN BY Siyi Chen
5 hours ago

The art of kung fu is thousands of years old. But the methods to document it haven’t developed much. Knowledge of kung fu is traditionally shared orally, or with simple illustrations. But these old, basic methods are no longer sufficient to preserve this ancient art form, which is dying out because of a dwindling number of practitioners.
So a team came up with a modern way of documenting kung fu, using 3D motion capture. International Guoshu Association, a non-profit organization, launched the “Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive” initiative, in collaboration with City University of Hong Kong, to document and study kung fu using digital technology. As you can see in the video above, they’ve started with the Hakka style of kung fu, which is prevalent in southern China. They say the technology can be applied to studying other schools of the practice.

[GeneChing]

...but this seemed worthy of its own thread at two posts. The one above is poached from our TCMA Survival thread (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69664-TCMA-Survival&p=1297220#post1297220), just for archival sake.


Wed Dec 21, 2016 | 4:21am EST
Hong Kong uses 3D archive to preserve kung fu heritage (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-kungfu-idUSKBN14A0RQ)

http://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20161221&t=2&i=1166250520&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=780&pl=468&sq=&r=LYNXMPECBK0GX
Dragon Sign kung fu master Wong Yiu-kau, in a black body-hugging motion-capture suit with 99 markers, performs during a recording for the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive at City University in Hong Kong December 6, 2016. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

http://s2.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20161221&t=2&i=1166250517&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=780&pl=468&sq=&r=LYNXMPECBK0GH
Dragon Sign Kung Fu master Wong Yiu-kau shows his fists at a martial arts class in Hong Kong, China December 17, 2016. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

http://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20161221&t=2&i=1166250516&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=780&pl=468&sq=&r=LYNXMPECBK0GK
A recorded 3D kung fu staff form is seen on a computer screen, as part of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive at City University in Hong Kong, China December 6, 2016. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

http://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20161221&t=2&i=1166250514&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=780&pl=468&sq=&r=LYNXMPECBK0GL
Dragon Sign kung fu master Wong Yiu-kau, in a black body-hugging motion-capture suit with 99 markers, performs during a recording for the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive at City University in Hong Kong December 6, 2016. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

http://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20161221&t=2&i=1166250513&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=780&pl=468&sq=&r=LYNXMPECBK0GO
Hing Chao (R), chief executive of the International Guoshu Association, and Dragon Sign kung fu master Wong Yiu-kau prepare for a recording for the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive at City University in Hong Kong December 6, 2016. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

By Pak Yiu | HONG KONG
Kung fu master Wong Yiu-Kau stands in a Hong Kong studio and waits as his black suit is covered head to toe in reflective markers to capture his every motion.

The lights dim and Wong launches a flurry of hand strikes, blocks and leg moves as two directors watch his movements displayed on computer screens.

The 56-year-old kung fu master is part of the world's first three-dimensional martial arts archive, a project that hopes to digitally preserve a tradition that experts fear is at risk of being lost forever.

"When I was a student, I was taught the moves and given a manual to just read. Now there is this where it's recorded and preserved with precision," said Wong, a master of the Southern Dragon style of kung fu.

There are hundreds of differing fight styles classed as kung fu, which soared in popularity globally following a series of films featuring U.S.-born and Hong Kong-raised actor Bruce Lee, who died in 1973.

But as kung fu's popularity waned in recent years, practitioners worried about passing the martial arts form to future generations.

The 3D project, known as the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive, aims to capture and preserve more than 400 different kung fu styles. About 50 have been recorded so far.

"Hong Kong is a very important city in the Chinese martial arts world," said Hing Chao, executive director of the Hong Kong Guoshu Association, a martial arts group working on the project with Hong Kong's City University.

"It has protected the resources and so far managed to preserve the different types of martial arts, but today, there are fewer people passing this tradition on," Chao said.

Project organizers say the 3D archive will not only preserve a discipline central to Hong Kong's heritage, it also offers newcomers a more easily accessible visual learning experience.

"We can have a richer content of kung fu styles," said Lau Chi Fung, the project's technical director.

(Editing by Darren Schuettler)
There are more pix if you follow the link.

[GeneChing]

The Last Stand of the Southern Praying Mantis: Preserving Hong Kong’s Vanishing Martial Arts (http://time.com/4587078/kung-fu-martial-arts-hakka-hong-kong-preserve/)
Joseph Hincks / Hong Kong 2:49 AM ET

https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/gettyimages-74961332.jpg?quality=85&w=1680
China Photos/Getty Images
The bronze statue of late martial-arts legend and actor Bruce Lee stands on the Avenue of Stars in this file photo taken on June 29, 2007, in Hong Kong

Kung fu is under threat in the very city that gave the world Bruce Lee. Can an ambitious new digital project preserve some of its arcane forms or even revive interest in it among a new generation?

“The waters of the Yangtze roll to the east, heroes come and go like foam on the waves.” — The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong

There are a couple of time-honored ways to find a kung fu master, cinema teaches us. You can begin a journey of a thousand miles with a single step, climb a misty mountain, and pluck a chrysanthemum to drop into the palm of your intended sifu. Or, you take a beating on the stone steps of a monastery and show up the next morning to stand vigil under the crabapple trees. Again and again with the beating and the vigils until one day the gate creaks open and wordlessly you follow your new master inside.

But finding the sifu of Jiangxi Bamboo Forest Praying Mantis kung fu — a fighting style inspired by the movements of the predatory insect — turns out to be way easier. It costs less than $100 by taxi from Hong Kong Island’s banking district. From there, you drive through an undersea tunnel into the glass and concrete cacophony of the Kowloon peninsula, and then follow the articulated trucks north along one of the highways that carve through the Nine Dragons range after which Kowloon is called, and into the New Territories.

Despite its beckoning, adventurous sounding name, the New Territories is, in reality, a 952-sq-km buffer of suburban housing developments, scrap yards and scrub-covered hills between Hong Kong and China proper. Here, the skyscrapers cede to pylons piercing the mist, and abandoned shipping containers rust among thickets of bamboo. At the end of one country road is Wo Hang village. And next to its post office, in a nylon track suit and waving through the drizzle, is sifu Lee Chun-lam: head of the Jiangxi Bamboo Forest Praying Mantis dynasty and master of the unicorn dance.

On a walk around Wo Hang, taking in a community hall hung with red banners for his son’s marriage, 68-year-old Lee recalls the unicorn dances here that would be performed at weddings, New Year celebrations, and other auspicious occasions. They first stirred his interest in kung fu. Men would don papier mâché unicorn heads and caper to cymbals, flashing tongues and shaking silk tails as neighbors lit firecrackers. “When I was kid, there was nothing to play with, and I was intrigued when I heard there were unicorns out and about. I was attracted by how animated and like animals they were,” Lee tells TIME.

Unicorn dances, and the form of Praying Mantis kung fu that Lee mastered, came to Hong Kong by way of the Hakka, a migrant people. Many landless Hakka — the word literally means guest families — settled in what is now the New Territories about 300 years ago. As a minority ethnic group in often hostile territory they relied on their fighting skills to survive. Martial arts was so embedded in their culture that when Lee — a 10th generation Hakka settler in Wo Hang — was growing up almost everyone studied kung fu.

Today, things are very different. Hong Kong has reared three generations of martial-arts stars — from the legendary “Little Dragon” Bruce Lee (no relation) and Shaolin Master Killer’s Gordon Liu, to Jackie Chan and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’s Chow Yun-fat, to Donnie Yen of Star Wars: Rogue One. But the kung fu that has a cult cinematic following the world over, and continues to inspire legions of mixed martial arts fighters, faces multiple threats back home.

Lee is one of the rare Hong Kong masters whose variant of kung fu is managing to survive — just about. Although Wo Hang’s remote location means he currently has just eight disciples, some of those disciples have taken on acolytes of their own in the city and there are a couple more Bamboo Forest Praying Mantis masters in Hong Kong besides him. Once a week, he also crosses the border to teach a class in the nearby mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen.

https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/dsc01768-1.jpg?w=560&quality=85&h=373
Tang Ming Tung—International Guoshu Association
Jiangxi Bamboo Forest Praying Mantis master Lee Chun-lam shows Plum Blossom spear technique in Hong Kong in 2015

Other forms of Hakka kung fu, however, are at risk of extinction. A sifu of Tung Kong Chow Ka, a different style of Praying Mantis kung fu, tells TIME that his style has fewer than 100 practitioners. Another sifu, the preternaturally ripped 62-year-old Yau Wan-wah, has five remaining disciples but no regular place to teach them his Iron Ox Praying Mantis, a style renowned for toughening its practitioners’ fists and forearms. And snowy haired Lam Yue-fau, who is 87 this year, is the only living master of one of the southern Chinese style known as Lam Gar Gau.

Some styles have gone altogether: Wat Shek Gau (“Rolling Rocks Teaching”), a type of martial arts practiced by quarry workers from Hakka villages, disappeared from Hong Kong as mining and stonework were phased out; Lau Man Gau (“Drifting People’s Teachings”), also of Hakka origin, is close to extinction.

“The root is in danger,” Chao Hing, the CEO of the International Guoshu Association, tells TIME. If the root withers altogether, he says, Hong Kong loses not just methods of self defense but “an embodied system of knowledge and communication.” These range from unicorn dances, to the use of weapons adapted from farm tools, to techniques inspired by the motion of stone-grinding rice into flour.

In fact, the decline of Hong Kong kung fu has been going on for half a century or more. Long before Bruce Lee enjoyed cinematic success in the 1970s as Hong Kong’s first global superstar, some of the martial arts he studied were already losing their hold on the Hakka villages of the New Territories. (The film star was trained in Wing Chun kung fu, which some experts say bears more resemblance to the Hakka style of fighting than it does to the styles of the Cantonese ethnic majority.)

Work in the impoverished, hardscrabble Hakka settlements was scarce, and jobs in Hong Kong’s nascent manufacturing sector were low paid. Many men, therefore, took advantage of Hong Kong’s status as a British colony to emigrate to the U.K., to be hired in the restaurants and takeaways of London, Birmingham and Manchester. Others signed up as seamen on the countless cargo ships that came through Hong Kong’s busy port. Wherever Hakka men found employment — from Liverpool to Rotterdam to Sydney — they sent for their fellow villagers and clansmen to join them. In this way, entire villages across the New Territories were emptied in a short space of time. Lee Chun-lam tells TIME that around 90% of the Hakka in Wo Hang left.

Meanwhile, development and population booms put the squeeze on rents. Many kung fu masters fled to Hong Kong in the late 1960s to escape the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. They set up their schools on Kowloon tenement rooftops — in those days, among the cheapest premises to be had in the urban area. But as waves of refugees continued to arrive from mainland China, demand for rooftop space spiked. A roaring economy, and scarce land area, meanwhile kept the price of other forms of property prohibitively high. Half way across the world, kung fu was a sensation. From late March to mid October 1973 six Hong Kong kung fu films held the No. 1 spot at U.S. box offices. But in Hong Kong itself, taking on the relatively extravagant square footage required for a busy martial arts gym was simply beyond the means of most sifu.

In recent decades, the pressure on kung fu has only intensified. The proliferation of different forms of entertainment, and a far greater choice of forms of exercise — from squash courts to skate parks to hiking trails and regular gyms — means that the territory’s young people have a plethora of ways of keeping themselves entertained and fit. When they do express an interest in combat sports, it is in its currently modish forms — Muay Thai, for example, or mixed martial arts. Kung fu is often seen as outdated or, even worse, brings to mind the slapstick form of fighting found in Jackie Chan films. continued next post

[GeneChing]

‘Endless grinding will make a sword treasured’

The last bastion of Tung Kong Chow Ka Southern Praying Mantis style is on the ninth floor of a nondescript gray building in Kowloon’s Mong Kok neighborhood — an area known for its street food, cheap shopping, brothels and occasional triad fights.

On a recent Wednesday, 13 barefoot students scuttled across a vinyl floor among boxes of promotional calendars and polythene wrapped unicorn masks. Fixed to the wall was a rack holding swords, staffs, and a spear of the kind used in the elaborate, twirling, Plum Blossom routine. On another wall, extractor fans sucked in grilled pork fumes from the apartment next door, instead of fresh air.

Master Li Tin-loy walked among his acolytes in a frog-button shirt. The sifu used a wooden staff to tap against straining calves and quads. Then he laid it on a fold-out table while he made minute adjustments to the rotation of wrists, or corrected the protrusion of knuckles.

When not attending to his students, Li — a former police officer — talked about the common origin of the various praying mantis styles. “One day there was a monk that noticed a fight between a mantis and a bird. The mantis won and he was wondering how and why,” he tells TIME. “Later on he caught a mantis and was just observing the way that they fight, the way they interact and then slowly developed a style based on its movements.”

Tung Kong Chow Ka Southern Praying Mantis is centered around a few seemingly simple sets of those movements. At Li’s gym, there are no flying kicks or Bruce Lee–style, falsetto yowls. Instead, there is the dull, repetitive whack of shin or elbow or fist on flesh, among which Li moves with a mantis’ coiled tension. Mastery comes through repetition and refinement. But since each movement has — to practitioners — infinite depth, mastery can be a long process. It takes five to six years of training before a student is even considered perfunctory.

The grandmaster of the Tung Kong Chow Ka, Lau Shui, moved to Hong Kong in the early part of the last century. Even then, and especially to a new arrival from Qing dynasty China, Hong Kong’s urban environment would have seemed fantastically alien. In the exciting, hothouse atmosphere of a foreign enclave, Lau broke away from the conservative attitudes surrounding martial arts and began teaching a form of praying mantis style to women. It was an astonishing act at a time when respectable Chinese females still thought it vaguely indecent to be seen outside of the home — but he also lost none of his toughness. Among his disciples was Ip Shui, whose feet the grandmaster would scorch with the bowl of his pipe to toughen them up.

https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/dsc05301-18.jpg?w=560&quality=85&h=374
Tang Ming Tung—International Guoshu Association
Chow Ka Southern Praying Mantis Master Li Tin-loy performs a set at a park in Hong Kong in 2016

Ip eventually proved worthy of carrying on the lineage, and taught Li for more than a decade, subjecting him to the same sort of arduous physical punishment. To this day, Li will invite an interlocutor to grip his neck and give it a squeeze. Astonishingly, nothing gives. It’s as if the years have grown him an invisible exoskeleton.

Between Li and Ip, and Ip and Lau, there was the close relationship between student and master of the kind once integral to the transmission of kung fu. Historically, students would travel for miles, and endure all sorts of privations, to find a master like Li, but the sifu acknowledges that such dedication today is a rarity. “The new generation doesn’t seem to be interested in learning this kind of cultural heritage — mainly because [they find it] really hard work and really boring,” he tells TIME.

There’s a Chinese adage he likes to quote to his followers: “Endless grinding will make a sword treasured, in the same way that plum blossoms acquire their scent after a bitter winter.” Nevertheless, his fear is that none among the new generation will be sufficiently dedicated to carry the lineage.

In Wo Hang, Lee shares the worry when it comes to the future of his Jiangxi Bamboo Forest Praying Mantis style. “When you start teaching without having picked up the whole package, there’s a bit less there,” Lee says. “The kung fu gets passed on again but less and less gets inherited, until finally it’s lost.”

‘A conversation between the past and the present’

The final keepers of Praying Mantis kung fu may not even be people but instead a bank of quietly humming servers at Hong Kong’s City University — located in the same Kowloon Tong neighborhood where Bruce Lee was raised, educated, and, in 1973, died.

Here, Professor Sarah Kenderdine (a specialist in creating interactive and immersive museum exhibits) and Professor Jeffrey Shaw (a leading figure in creating art from new forms of media) have been collaborating with the International Guoshu Association on what Shaw calls “a conversation between the past and the present.”

Using the same sort of motion-capture sensors employed by video-game developers, 1000-frames-per-second cameras and virtual-reality projections, this project at City University aims to record each of Hong Kong’s disappearing kung fu styles with digital accuracy before their last masters retire, become infirm or pass away.

On a recent Tuesday, Li performed the fundamental movement groups of Tung Kong Chow Ka Southern Praying Mantis in a black-walled room in Kowloon. The room was equipped with scores of scaffold-mounted video cameras. Dressed entirely in black and with almost 100 motion-capture sensors suckered to his body and head the sifu looked more insectoid than ever.

https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/kung-fu-motion-visualization-01.jpg?w=560&quality=85
Tobias Gremmler for City University of Hong Kong.
Still from video of motion visualization at 300 Years of Hakka Kung Fu exhibit at City University of Hong Kong.

Shaw tells TIME that data taken from the recordings of Li will be fed into various installations, which are currently displayed in an exhibition entitled 300 Years of Hakka Kung Fu at the university’s School of Creative Media. One of the displays recreates a typical training hall: there is the scent of incense, information on Chinese medicines, and recordings of the thumps and thuds made at Li’s Mong Kok studio. Another display called “Re-Actor” shows different perspectives of a martial artist thrusting and whirling a spear. When Shaw presses a button on a panel in front of the display, it reveals the shapes of movements through space and time, or the traces left by the paths of the martial artist’s limbs and weapons.

So far, around 40 kung fu styles have been recorded by Shaw, Kenderdine and their team, including Jiangxi Bamboo Forest, Tung Kong Chow Ka Southern, and Iron Ox. The hope is that the work will strengthen the argument for the creation of an institute for Chinese martial studies in Hong Kong, which, Chao says, is the surest way to ensure that local forms of kung fu will be preserved.

For now, the hope is that City University’s work will create a renewed interest in kung fu, attracting the attention of young, digital-savvy Hong Kongers at a time when a desire for greater autonomy or even independence from China — which resumed sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997 — has forced many here to define and isolate a uniquely Hong Kong culture as opposed to a generically Chinese one.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gayZyYqhjA

Back in 1962, a renowned Bamboo Forest sifu called Wong Yuk-kwong came to Wo Hang village in the New Territories. That was the summer 9-year-old Lee was mesmerized by dancing unicorns, and when he learned the visiting sifu also practiced the unicorn dance he resolved to become a disciple.

But Lee’s family was poor and couldn’t afford the monthly tuition, which worked out, in those days, to the local equivalent of $1.70. Instead he would stand at the edges of the classes. Every evening, alone, he would then practice the movements he had seen. Eventually, noting the boy’s dedication, the master consented to take him on as his disciple, waiving training fees and asking only that he brew him a pot of tea every evening.

Fifty-four years later, things are brewing once again for Lee, and for Praying Mantis kung fu.

—With reporting by Kevin Lui / Hong Kong

Nice bit of long form journalism for TIME. Kudos to the author.

[Jimbo]

That is an excellent article.

[SevenStar]

this is awesome

[GeneChing]

Al Jazeera English
February 3 at 5:14am · Doha, Qatar ·
Motion capture technology is helping preserve the moves of Kung Fu masters, before their ancient ways are forgotten.


https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera/videos/10155171748788690/

Play -1:23
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Our video embedding function says it can do Facebook, but I have yet to figure out how that works exactly.

[GeneChing]

Hong Kong immortalises kung fu in world’s first 3D martial arts archive (http://coconuts.co/hongkong/news/hong-kong-immortalises-kung-fu-worlds-first-3d-martial-arts-archive/)
By Coconuts Hong Kong Dec. 22, 2016

http://coconuts.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wong_yiu-kau_kung_fu_poses_with_students_-_tyrone_siu_reuters-1024x1024.jpg?large

Kung fu master Wong Yiu-kau stands in a Hong Kong studio and waits as his black suit is covered head to toe in reflective markers to capture his every motion.

http://coconuts.co/public/field/image/wong_yiu-kau_kung_fu_motion_capture_-_bobby_yip_reuters.jpg
Wong performs during a recording for the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive at CUHK on Dec. 6, 2016. Photo: Bobby Yip, Reuters

The lights dim and Wong launches a flurry of hand strikes, blocks and leg moves as two directors watch his movements displayed on computer screens.

http://coconuts.co/public/field/image/wong_yiu-kau_kung_fu_close_up_-_bobby_yip_reuters.jpg
A close-up of Wong, in a motion-capture suit, performing at CUHK on Dec. 6, 2016. Photo: Bobby Yip/Reuters

The 56-year-old kung fu master is part of the world’s first three-dimensional martial arts archive, a project that hopes to digitally preserve a tradition that experts fear is at risk of being lost forever.

“When I was a student, I was taught the moves and given a manual to just read. Now there is this where it’s recorded and preserved with precision,” said Wong, a master of the Southern Dragon style of kung fu.

http://coconuts.co/public/field/image/wong_yiu-kau_kung_fu_teaches_class_2_-_tyrone_siu_reuters.jpg
Wong teaching a martial arts class on Dec. 17, 2016. Photo: Tyrone Siu, Reuters

There are hundreds of differing fight styles classed as kung fu, which soared in popularity globally following a series of films featuring US-born and Hong Kong-raised actor Bruce Lee, who died in 1973.

But as kung fu’s popularity waned in recent years, practitioners worried about passing the martial arts form to future generations.

The 3D project, known as the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive, aims to capture and preserve more than 400 different kung fu styles. About 50 have been recorded so far.

http://coconuts.co/public/field/image/hing_chao_intl_guoshu_association_-_bobby_yip_reuters.jpg

“Hong Kong is a very important city in the Chinese martial arts world,” said Hing Chao, executive director of the Hong Kong Guoshu Association, a martial arts group working on the project with Hong Kong’s City University.

“It has protected the resources and so far managed to preserve the different types of martial arts, but today, there are fewer people passing this tradition on,” Chao said.

http://coconuts.co/public/field/image/recorded_3d_staff_form_-_bobby_yip_reuters.jpg

Project organizers say the 3D archive will not only preserve a discipline central to Hong Kong’s heritage, it also offers newcomers a more easily accessible visual learning experience.

“We can have a richer content of kung fu styles,” said Lau Chi-fung, the project’s technical director.

Words/Photos: Reuters

I'm wondering now how well you could actually learn from this. Don't get me wrong. I'm totally in support of it. And it clearly yields more information than video. But I'm wondering how it might serve as an instructional device, as opposed to just an archival record.

[Cataphract]

I'm wondering now how well you could actually learn from this. Don't get me wrong. I'm totally in support of it. And it clearly yields more information than video. But I'm wondering how it might serve as an instructional device, as opposed to just an archival record.
That was my first thought, too. Having something in 3D is naturally more accurate than 2D. If you accept video as a training tool, this is better still. Of course there is a lot that can't be expressed in 3D coordinates: Momentum, the whole mind/intention thing etc. Also different body types might just necessitate different execution of the same technique.

Watching yourself in a mirror or in a video can be extremely helpful. I would really like to see a video of me doing some form overlain with an expert executing the same form. That should be relatively easy to realize with those recordings.

[Jimbo]

I think it's great the way they are archiving this stuff. I do have doubts that someone could completely learn most (or any?) CMAs like this from scratch. Like video, it's great if the user already has basic hands-on experience. Then this would be a good supplement and review.

If few people have any interest in learning such art(s), they will eventually go extinct, anyway.

[-N-]

I'm wondering now how well you could actually learn from this. Don't get me wrong. I'm totally in support of it. And it clearly yields more information than video. But I'm wondering how it might serve as an instructional device, as opposed to just an archival record.


That was my first thought, too. Having something in 3D is naturally more accurate than 2D. If you accept video as a training tool, this is better still. Of course there is a lot that can't be expressed in 3D coordinates: Momentum, the whole mind/intention thing etc. Also different body types might just necessitate different execution of the same technique.



I think it's great the way they are archiving this stuff. I do have doubts that someone could completely learn most (or any?) CMAs like this from scratch. Like video, it's great if the user already has basic hands-on experience. Then this would be a good supplement and review.


Better for archive than instruction. Maybe instructional if the person already has a lot of background and understanding. Otherwise, just more empty martial dance.

3D coordinates over time does contain momentum data. But yes, mind/intent/focus is missing.

A lot of people already are human archives of empty forms.

A few weeks ago, I was at the park practicing spear and broadsword techniques.

Another teacher offered to demo his Tai Chi broadsword form for me. Looked pretty good, and even contained some subtle high level application details.

But it turned out that he didn't know how to apply any of the techniques or skills against another weapon, how/where to cut the opponent, or how to integrate his offensive/defensive footwork. The intent and focus was missing, along with the understanding of the form content. I thought it was pretty good that he had some of the subtle details, but it turned out that he was just going through the motions, and they didn't mean anything to him.

We spent the next hour drilling basic broadsword and spear attack, counterattack, defense, and maneuvering so he could get a feel for the actual usage of his broadsword form.

[SteveLau]

Great archive work. I salute to the people who participate in the project. There is a significant shortcoming if there is no audio record of the Martial Arts demonstrated. The vocal sound and breathing method are important parts of fight techniques. I hope these are also recorded.



Regards,

KC
Hong Kong

[SteveLau]

As an instructional device, the Archive will be helpful to mid-level students as reference material. Like record in other media, it is not meant for beginners or people new to the style of art to learn the art without training by a sifu.



Steve Lau
Hong Kong

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G3Ha7DzRUU

Sammo Hung (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?55110-Sammo-Hung) & Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69951-Hong-Kong-Martial-Arts-Living-Archive)

[GeneChing]

Hong Kong martial arts grandmaster Lam Sai-wing brought to life in 3D exhibition (http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2109818/hong-kong-martial-arts-grandmaster-lam-sai-wing-brought-life-3d-exhibition)
Hung kuen-style kung fu master Lam was photographed showing his moves in the 1920s. Motion-capture footage of his descendants practising hung kuen was analysed and combined, resulting in a 3D animation of Lam in action
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 05 September, 2017, 6:18pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 06 September, 2017, 9:07pm

https://cdn3.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/980x551/public/images/methode/2017/09/05/de8758e2-91f7-11e7-b116-f4507ff9df92_1280x720_184230.JPG?itok=F8QsHPr_

Rachel Cheung

Fascinated by photography, Lam Sai-wing, a grandmaster of an important kung fu system known as hung kuen, was so drawn by the technology that he showed his moves in front of the camera, capturing each step in photos. That was in the 1920s, and little did he know, the pictures will enable future generations to bring his art back to life almost a century later.

https://cdn3.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2017/09/05/ddcc0fd8-91f7-11e7-b116-f4507ff9df92_972x_184230.JPG
Lam Sai-wing in a photo taken in the 1920s.

A realistic animation of Lam’s Iron Wire Boxing is one of the highlights in the exhibition Lingnan Hung Kuen Across the Century: Kung Fu Narratives in Hong Kong Cinema and Community, which opens at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre on September 6.
The team – International Guoshu Association (IGA) working with City University of Hong Kong – built a 3D model of Lam with his photos and captured the core motion data by having master Oscar Lam, the fourth generation carrier of the Lam family hung kuen style, demonstrate in a studio. The data was then mapped onto the model. But the story doesn’t end there.

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3D models of Lam.

“There are nuances or characteristics of each performer. Oscar’s performance is certainly his own and cannot be used to directly represent Lam Sai-wing,” says Hing Chao, curator of the exhibition and executive director of IGA.

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Lam Chun-fai demonstrates hung kuen.

To present an animation that is closest to Lam’s rendition of Iron Wire Boxing, the team compared the motion capture data with performances by Oscar Lam Chuen-ho’s father Lam Chun-fai, historic photos of Lam Sai-wing and extrapolation of Lam’s teachings. The entire process took six months.
“We do it because we can,” says Jeffrey Shaw, director of the Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media at the City University, where the motion capture studio is located. “It’s a way of bringing the past into the present and making it more seductive to a contemporary audience.”
The exhibition, a programme in this year’s Hong Kong Culture Festival, focuses on two influential families that were practitioners of Hung Kuen. “Hung Kuen played a very prominent role in modernisation of southern Chinese martial arts and had a great impact on the development of kung fu in Hong Kong both before and after the war,” says Chao, adding it is very rare for a kung fu style to have more than 100 years of history in the city.

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A full-colour 3D rendering of Lam Sai-wing.

Lam Sai-wing was a butcher as well as a student of the legendary Chinese martial artist Wong Fei-hung. He has been instrumental in constructing hung kuen as we know it today. While we may think of hung kuen as only one kung fu style, it is a hybrid system that encompasses various southern Chinese martial arts.
Lam also contributed to the modernisation of the traditional art. “This is seen in his efforts to construct Nam Mou Athletic Association, which was the first athletic association in Hong Kong that took on board a lot of those Western sports education concepts, but focused on the heritage and practice of traditional southern Chinese martial arts,” says Chao.

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A still from Lau Kar-leung’s Challenge of the Masters.

The other martial arts family featured in the exhibition is that of Liu Zhan. Liu’s son is late film director Lau Kar-leung, who worked in the 1970s and ’80s for the Shaw Brothers Studio, first as an action choreographer before directing his own films. Selected scenes from his classics, such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Martial Club, have been adapted into 3D and will be shown at the exhibition.

Lingnan Hung Kuen Across the Century: Kung Fu Narratives in Hong Kong Cinema and Community, Exhibition Hall, 5/F, Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, 7 Kennedy Rd, Mid-Levels.
Sept 6 to 25, 10am – 9pm, closed on Tuesdays. Free admission.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as:
Kung fu master brought to life in 3D motion capture

Lam Sai Wing (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?1524-Lam-Sai-Wing-Books) meets the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69951-Hong-Kong-Martial-Arts-Living-Archive)

Too cool. I would love to see this.

[diego]

Lam Sai Wing (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?1524-Lam-Sai-Wing-Books) meets the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69951-Hong-Kong-Martial-Arts-Living-Archive)

Too cool. I would love to see this.

This is great, Gene you guys should do a trial run of like 5 Animals Shaolin and legends of Kung Fu masters series dolls lol...I mean with this 3d Blender software imaging any Hung Ga fan could sends the blueprints to a local toy maker online and have a figurine like GI Joe or Star Wars probably for a few hundred bucks..do it right with enough fancy characters MARVEL could pick it up for future Iron Fist comic lines promotions.

https://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2017/09/05/dd7a736c-91f7-11e7-b116-f4507ff9df92_1320x770_184230.JPG

Like I would like to have a figurine of every move in every form in the martial arts world. You could make $30 dollar ones and collector $3000 dollar ones and go smart make a $20 dollar grab bag of colorful mini masters like the old bags of green army men.

It`s too bad Golden harvest and Shaw Bro`s etc didn`t branch out into Nintendo and Sony Hong Kong for Kung Fu video games.:) The various Chinese weapons are just asking to be animated for PS4 at an epic scale like all the work LucasFilms did promoting LightSabers.

[GeneChing]

Scientific process inspires UChicago art/science lab, whose latest play entangles quantum concepts and kung fu (https://news.uchicago.edu/story/scientific-process-inspires-uchicago-artscience-lab-whose-latest-play-entangles-quantum)

https://cdn.news.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/images/2019-12/kungfu2.jpg?itok=SVIvFUyA
STAGE Lab members (from left) Collin Van Son, Sunanda Prabhu-Gaunkar, Ellen Wiese, Madeleine Kerr and Edison Hong take a class with kung fu Master Oscar Lam (right) as part of a workshop in Hong Kong.

Photo by Willy Tang

By Louise Lerner
Dec 12, 2019

Scholars and students use technology to create new stories for the theater

Scientists stage experiments all the time—but only a few stage plays. But at the University of Chicago, an innovative art/science lab embedded in its Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering has found inspiration in a unique place: the scientific process.

“We use research, brainstorming and improvisation to generate and investigate new ideas, with continuous analysis and feedback,” said Prof. Nancy Kawalek, the director, actor and writer who heads STAGE (Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration).

But these are not science lectures disguised as plays, she said: “By creating emotionally engaging stories, we get the public interested in and excited about science.”

STAGE is based at the PME, the first school in the nation dedicated to defining molecular engineering—an emerging field that builds on advances in basic science to design technology from the molecular level up. In turn, Kawalek works with scholars, students, scientists and artists from across the University, as well as externally, to also use technology as an integral part of staging stories about science.

The STAGE lab group is comprised of scientists and artists who collaboratively develop new theater work through a unique process of improvisation and iteration. Each theater project centers on a scientific concept, which is integrated over months of rehearsals into a story that has an emotional parallel to the scientific topic. For example, the lab’s latest project melds quantum entanglement and kung fu.

https://cdn.news.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/images/2019-12/provenance_bts2.jpg?itok=reGjN8If
A STAGE Lab brainstorming session on the use of technology to tell a story.
Photo courtesy STAGE Lab

The project was inspired when Kawalek became aware of a museum exhibit that used motion capture and other technology to map a young kung fu master’s moves onto a lifelike avatar of his long-deceased great-grandfather, the revered Master Lam Sai Wing.

“In this way, the singular style of kung fu originated by Lam Sai Wing, and in some sense the master himself, were brought back to life on film,” Kawalek said. “Though still in the very early stages, Entanglement is evolving into a play about science, technology, memory and heritage. Quantum entanglement takes us into the remarkable future of technology, while the intangible cultural heritage of kung fu offers inextricable links to the past.”

Kawalek was fascinated by the museum exhibit, especially after learning that the words “kung fu” carry, among other things, the connotation of energy and time. Additional links emerged through discussions with Tian Zhong, a PME assistant professor and STAGE collaborator, who has been doing research on a quantum phenomenon called time-energy entanglement.

Zhong said the exhibit is a powerful demonstration of the type of connections STAGE wants to draw. “The avatar represents a collapsing of time, spanning two generations through movement. This is exactly the essence of time-energy entanglement, so we thought this was a perfect way to inform an audience about the concepts of quantum physics,” he said.

This past summer, the STAGE group worked with The Hong Kong Jockey Club University of Chicago Academic Complex | The University of Chicago Francis and Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong, traveling to Hong Kong to research kung fu and quantum science. Students and faculty met with Master Oscar Lam, Lam Sai Wing’s great-grandson; Hing Chao, a leading advocate for the preservation of Chinese martial arts; and the museum exhibit’s artist, Prof. Jeffrey Shaw, a distinguished media artist at the City University of Hong Kong.

Throughout the Hong Kong workshop, research, kung fu lessons, and brainstorming and motion capture sessions provided compelling material for developing Entanglement, Kawalek said. For example, Zhong and the STAGE group had a fruitful discussion with Chao about the role of energy in martial arts. When Zhong raised questions about scientific concepts like conservation, Chao offered an impromptu demonstration of forces specific to different martial arts, such as the linear punches of boxing, versus the arcing shapes of many methods of attack in other types of Chinese martial arts.

https://cdn.news.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/images/2019-12/provenance_production_still_1.jpg?itok=h9dngGa8
A scene from the workshop production of a previous STAGE play, "The Art of Questionable Provenance."
Photo by HMS Media

As the play develops, Zhong said, he hopes it will increase public awareness and knowledge about quantum science, especially among younger generations. “Some of the concepts in quantum physics are very counterintuitive, and it’s a struggle to relate them to our everyday experiences,” he said. “But I believe earlier and greater exposure to ‘bizarre’ concepts such as these will generate many more innovative ideas down the road.”

STAGE continues to investigate the ideas discovered during their Hong Kong research trip, and Kawalek said the lab hopes to present a workshop production in 2020.

As with all STAGE lab projects, Kawalek said, the goal of Entanglement is to excite the public about science and technology through theater that is relevant to our lives, which are influenced by technological and scientific advances at every turn.

“These connections between science and art—at some level, they’re about the same thing,” Zhong said. “Both start with asking intriguing questions. Then you use existing knowledge to inquire and explore, and the outcome is creation—new knowledge or new art. It’s just the toolsets that are different.”

THREADS
Lam Sai Wing (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?1524-Lam-Sai-Wing-Books)
Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?69951-Hong-Kong-Martial-Arts-Living-Archive)
Martial Arts in Live Theater (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?49689-Martial-Arts-in-Live-Theater)