The statue of Bruce Lee in the Hong Kong Heritage Museum

4.1 Representational features

The statue at the entrance of the Heritage Museum presents a single figure. For this reason, my analysis of Work with that of Figure will be combined and an analysis of features at the rank of Member will be presented where relevant. Following Bowcher and Liang (2014), at the rank of Work, the Representational features relate to the “Process,” “Theme,” and “Peripeteia” of the statue, and at the rank of Figure to “Participants,” “Body,” “Act,” “Movement/Stasis,” and “Position.”

The Bruce Lee statue as a sculpture of a single figure presents a perfect example of what O’Toole calls “a construal of a representative act” (2011: 42). He is standing on his right foot with his left foot raised up high. This is a dynamic posture suggestive of combat and physical training. The way his body is depicted is life-like, or in other words, anthropomorphic.

Analysis at the level of Member involves looking at the parts of a sculptured figure. The pants and belt Lee wears are part of the classic Chinese martial arts uniform (usually with a sleeveless matching top), with the drapery clearly molded. The sculpture replicates the appearance of Bruce Lee in his Kung Fu films, where he is a hero fighting off villains (typically Caucasian people) in order to protect his fellow Chinese.

4.2 Modal features

Under the Modal function, several categories taken from O’Toole’s model will be considered to examine how the Bruce Lee sculpture engages the viewers and the space.

Scale: The scale of sculptures is often judged in relation to that of the human body. The larger-than-life scale that can be seen in the Bruce Lee statue (see Figure 2) has a functional significance: as Bowcher and Liang put it, scaling up the size of a sculpture to make the subject look much bigger than an ordinary human being “not only gives physical strength but also a heroic essence to the subject” (2014: 13).

Mass: With regard to the center of gravity, with Lee standing on only one foot (his right foot), the statue has its gravity from the waist down, which is further balanced by the positioning of his lowered right arm. The statue is molded in bronze as its material and stabilized by the rectangular, granite plinth. Furthermore, the sculpture involves enormous interplay with space, as the whole body forms a ‘Y’ shape against the imaginary space created by the dimensions of the plinth.

Equilibrium: The statue is most definitely earthbound (“Chthonic”), with a very thin plinth in comparison with the size of the sculpture. It is located at the top of a stairway surrounded by ascending and descending escalators (see Figure 3). At the bottom of the stairway, there is a barrier to prevent visitors from touching the sculpture (“Palpability”). Thus the statue is constructed so that viewers cannot directly engage with it or stand next to it. Not only are we not allowed to touch it, but the height of the statue also tends to suggest that the visitor is meant to view it from a distance – to contemplate it – rather than glancing at it “causally in passing” (O’Toole 2011: 40), as happens with the civic statue of Bruce Lee positioned on the promenade in Tsim Sha Tsui, one of the bustling districts in Hong Kong frequented by tourists from all over the world.

Address: Address in relation to sculptures is mainly concerned with the way the sculpture “addresses” the viewer with its Face, Stance, and Gaze and with its actual location. Looking slightly upwards and ahead into the distance, the figure does not make eye contact with the viewers and is thus set apart from the public. Meanwhile, the depiction characterizes Lee (“Characterization”) as calm and sober due to the way in which his facial expression is sculpted, with lips tightly pressed together and a slight frown creasing the forehead above his eyes.

The stairway leading to the statue also enacts a type of “Address.” Placing Lee at the highest step of the stairway signifies that the subject of the statue is metaphorically of a “higher,” iconic status as a famed actor performing on the stage, and walking toward the stairway involves the visitor getting closer to pay their respects to their “idol” before entering the museum. This suggests a relatively intimate relation between this statue and the viewers.

Modality: With Lee represented in a very life-like manner (albeit larger than life in terms of scale), the status greatly resembles reality, and hence constitutes an authentic representation (“Authenticity”).

At the rank of Member, the statue presents Lee in a detailed manner. Features including his hair lines, facial expression, torso, hands, arms, legs, and the pants he wears are clearly and finely shown, vividly allowing visitors to remember the numerous combat scenes in films starring Lee.

Expressiveness: The expression on the statue’s face is almost one of calm contemplation. We say “almost” here because the very slight furrowing of the brow gives the face a somewhat serious expression. The seriousness is reinforced by the way his eyes look into the distance and the way his lips are tightly pressed together, as already noted.

Relation to lights: Slight beams of light projected from the two sets of overhead stage lights highlight the calm and seriousness of the statue’s face and the elegance and control of the leg-strike pose. With the light, the veins on the figure’s left arm up to his shoulder clearly stand out, signifying the power of physical strength.

Message: The message is thus both a declaration of respect for an individual, a famous actor, as represented by the statue, and a statement that this is someone who is greater than the average person, a cultural icon who is worthy of respect, admiration, and reverence.

4.3 Compositional features

From the theoretical framework outlined above, the following four compositional features are directly relevant to the statue of Bruce Lee under analysis.

Volume in relation to space and Proportion in relation to setting: The statue is located at the museum entrance and was unveiled on 20 July 2013 as a commemoration of Bruce Lee’s legacy exactly forty years after his death. The exhibition is hosted in a thematic gallery of the museum and is the largest of its kind compared with the city’s other similar exhibitions on Bruce Lee in the past.

As noted above, the statue is located on the highest level of the steps of a stairway leading to it. Immediately behind the statue is a series of five vertical banners, carrying the verbal text (in both English and Chinese) of the name of the exhibition. The entire space occupied by these five banners is slightly larger than and away from that of the sculpture, serving as a backdrop for the statue. In other words, the statue is not dependent on anything (“Independence”). Its location on a platformed area of the entrance with the exhibition banners set a little further away at the back, and only one set of stairs leading to it, make the immediate area of the statue a relatively closed one (“Closeness”).

Materials: This statue uses bronze for the body of Bruce Lee and granite for the plinth. Bronze has been one of the most widely used metallic materials for sculpture. According to O’Toole, “the hard, unyielding bronze shows every sign of the intense energy that went into their modeling,” with the shiny surface “accentuating the highlights and furrows in the flesh” (1994: 62–63). This is particularly important for the statue commemorating Bruce Lee as a martial arts guru whose muscular body bears testament to strenuous physical training.

Parallelism & Rhythm: This sculpture has a rectangular plinth supporting a figure, which taken together form a largely symmetrical “Y” shape. There is thus a sense of parallelism and rhythmic repetition established in the length of the plinth and the horizontality of the statue itself. There is also a sense of rhythm established by the layering of the five banners behind the statue and the layering of the steps leading to the statue. The statue is thus the focal point of the grounds both in the sense that it rests on the highest level of the stairway vertically and represents the central point of the backdrop horizontally. The focus is reinforced by the stage lights being directed toward the center of the statue.

Cohesion: The cohesion of the statue comes mainly from its materials and connection with the setting. As Bowcher and Liang (2014: 16) note, bronze is generally regarded as construing a sense of tradition and timelessness, and granite a sense of strength and durability. There is thus a sense of cohesion established by the degree of durability of the materials used in this sculpture and its location as the focal point of the grounds and the cultural heritage of Bruce Lee in perpetuity. A spiritual cohesion is also established between the statue, the Heritage Museum, and Lee’s hometown (Hong Kong), all of which are memorial places of Lee’s legacy.

5.1 The location

The location of the Bruce Lee statue under scrutiny has been carefully thought out. As noted earlier, Lee is a heroic figure and honored in several public monuments in different parts of the world. While these public statues are all located in massive squares and parks, the fact that the statue being analyzed is located in the entrance of the Heritage Museum allows the figure of Lee to be at the center of visitors’ attention. As we have seen, modal features such as scale and relation to light and compositional features such as rhythmic relations and parallelism are used to cohere naturally with the environment as well as to highlight the characteristics of Bruce Lee as a salient figure worthy of our contemplation and reverence.

After years of trying unsuccessfully to turn Lee’s city home into a museum, he is finally getting the retrospective exhibition that his gargantuan legacy deserves. Visitors to the museum are able to view his photos, film props, handwritten notes, and poetry, along with the 3.5 m bronze statue of the man himself at the entrance to the exhibition. Indeed, the exhibition can be viewed as an important feature of the context that helps us to understand the statue in a more insightful way than viewing it in isolation.

As suggested in the title of the exhibition, the three elements – Kung Fu, art, and life – draw our attention to the significance of constructing the giant statue as a means of commemorating Lee’s philosophy of life, his achievements, and his influences on martial arts and the art of film. In Little’s (1999)Artist of life, he comments on how Bruce Lee was an intense man full of energy and enthusiasm for life and knowledge of Kung Fu, philosophy, psychology, poetry, JKD, acting, and, most importantly, self-improvement. In fact, the book title comes from a telling statement once spoken by Bruce Lee himself: “Basically, I have always been a martial artist by choice and actor by profession. But above all, I am hoping to actualize myself to be an artist of life along the away” (Little 1999: xiii). “Artist of life,” in Little’s (1999: xiii) definition, refers to a process of enriching oneself through the use of their continuous questioning and independent judgement, and seeking to fully actualize oneself as a total human being, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Lee’s positive outlook on life is also evident in his poems as part of the memorabilia displayed in the museum exhibition. As illustrated in the following poem, Lee injects new life into a dying leaf by turning it into a bookmark.

The Falling Leaf

The wind is in high frolic with the rain.

Outside the garden a little yellow leaf

Clinging desperately to its mother branch.

I pick up the leaf

And put it in the book,

Giving it a home. (Bruce Lee, cited in Little 1999: xiii)

Based on a selection of Lee’s quotations as a result of his thoughts evolved and refined over the years about familiar and important aspects of life, Little (2000b) demonstrates how Lee’s statements on life reflect his objection to blind obedience to external authority, awakening people to the problems inherent in conventional assumptions. Those aphorisms are a vital part of the cultural heritage of Lee, which not only has profound implications for the removal of artificial barriers to nationality, ethnicity, and class structure globally, but was the rationale behind the display of the first monument to Bruce Lee in Mostar, Bosnia mentioned at the beginning of this article. According to the organizers, the statue was to honor Lee as “the universal symbol of peace” (Avgita 2007: 221), serving as a “rebuke to the ongoing use of public spaces to glorify the country’s competing nationalisms” (Zaitchik 2006). It is critical that Lee was neither Croatian, Serb, nor Muslim, and that his statue faced North, favoring neither East nor West in the Bosnian city that had been divided and at war over differing identities. This suggests that Bruce Lee’s stature as a popular cultural icon is international (Eschen 2006: 56). Historian Vijay Prashad (2001, 2003 also discusses the global significance of Lee for popularizing the practice of martial arts worldwide, “appealing not only to Chinese communities, as his primary audience, but also other minority communities in the West” (Teo 2009: 77). However, taking into consideration that his career and status all stemmed from the series of films that he made in Hong Kong, positioning his statue in the city’s Heritage Museum seems to be a justifiable decision and particularly well-suited for stressing his cultural heritage across multiple continents with memorabilia sourced from abroad.

More broadly, positioning this statue of Lee (and another public statue depicting him) in the city of Hong Kong can remind visitors of his contribution and the heroic deeds achieved as a rebuke to the image of physically weak, innately subservient Chinese men once propagated in the West which was indicative of the early years of political situation of the colonized city under British rule. Kaminsky (1982) notes that Lee’s films typically foreground the uniqueness of colonial Hong Kong and considers that these films typically express anti-imperialist sentiments by playing out fantasies that would “give the satisfaction of revenge and the opportunity to earn the respect of others who witness the performance of superman agility” (Kaminsky 1982: 138), serving as a way of redressing the problem of social injustice as well as helping to construct national identity among the Chinese audience and a sense of pride in their history.^[5] Specifically, Shu (2003: 53) argues that Lee embodies “a kind of nationalism in his own physical presence”; as a symbol of indigenous virtue and strength, Lee symbolizes “a Chinese nationalism that was mixed with Confucian-based morality, filial piety, individual dignity, brotherhood and national honor” (Lu et al. 2014: 324). Indeed, as will be outlined in the next section, the Heritage Museum statue represents Lee as a promising individual full of Chinese masculinity and vision, which seems to reflect local ideological leanings toward Lee.

5.2 A single-figure representation

The single-figure representation in Lee’s hometown and, along with this, the construction of a well-lit area with steps leading to the statue present Lee as almost godlike. This is supported by attitudes surrounding Bruce Lee at certain times and by certain groups of people throughout contemporary history (see, among others, Bowman 2010; Green and Svinth 2010).

The most striking Member feature of this single-figure representation is the sculpture of his fighting stance, which is somewhat different from the classic – defensive – fighting pose adopted by the other five statues of Lee. In this case, the figure’s pose in conjunction with the strong muscular bodily features of the upper part of the body suggests two phases of the action, a Peripeteia in O’Toole’s terms (2011: 42), that epitomizes both what has preceded – here, rigorous physical training and military discipline – and what follows – the moment of a powerful strike as a form of attack.

While the representation of Lee in the museum sculpture is rather unusual compared with the other five statues, kicking – together with punching, trapping, and ground fight – is one of the four ranges of combat in JKD, which was developed by Bruce Lee as a street-effective form of combat (Tucker 2011: 19). When Lee designed JKD in the late 1960s, he was the first martial artist to include elements of basic boxing principles from the West to create a highly innovative and syncretic form of Kung Fu, blending traditional martial arts modified from Wing Chun techniques with footwork timing and rhythm from Western boxing (Lee 1975).^[6] JKD does not always promote using the fist because it can damage the hand,^[7] and as a consequence fast kicks are widely considered as among the signature Kung Fu moves in all of Lee’s films (Cheung 2003). Furthermore, in the JKD system, there is very little emphasis on self-defense; yet an individual getting involved in a street situation – just as Lee always did in his films – is expected to fight in the manner that favors the element of surprise to interrupt the pattern of the attacker. As Tucker puts it, “JKD is a concept – an always evolving science,” and at the nexus of JKD training, “[i]t incorporates intercepting the fist or attacking your opponent while they are attempting to attack you” (2011: 18). In other words, a quick and decisive victory hinges on an innovative form of martial arts that “could simultaneously intercept/interrupt an attack (‘Jeet’) and deliver a simultaneous hit of one’s own (‘Kuen’)” (Bowman 2013: 67). For this reason, notwithstanding the slight oddity of being in a rather unusual combative pose, the Member feature of the proactive sidekick fighting pose deployed in Lee’s sculpture at the museum appears to be more representative of his JKD than the defensive pose adopted in the other five statues.

Another salient Member feature of Lee’s body is his naked torso, which has been adopted in all of the statues of him in Hong Kong and worldwide. Nitta argues that Lee’s figure, particularly the bare torso, expresses a sense of ethnic masculinity, “an Asian version of morality, authority, and supremacy” (2010: 377). She observes that in contemporary cinema, socially vulnerable working-class male protagonists without any promising future (e.g. an unskilled paint-shop clerk, an underachieving high-school student, and a dancing dude) often adopt Lee as the ideal image of a powerful person free of confined, emasculated stereotype. In other words, Lee’s topless torso has been repeatedly reproduced and represented as embodiment of a masculine status despite the potential lack of cultural and economic capital. For such characters, the strength of Lee’s muscular bare torso legitimizes the possibility of terminating their disempowerment and providing them with a future hope for an improvement in conditions. As Žižek (2004: 78–79) notes, Lee’s body functions as a generic narrative of struggle that transcends ethnic and cultural groups and translates into “a genuine working-class ideology of youngsters whose only means of success was the disciplinary training of their only possession, their bodies.”

In particular, this very different masculine self-expression for Chinese men vis-à-vis their Caucasian counterparts represented through Lee’s naked torso and his Kung Fu moves may have some bearing on the popularity of his films among the local Hong Kong inhabitants, who once suffered at the hands of Japanese and Western imperial oppressors (Chan 2000; Chiao 1981). In that sense, Lee’s exposed torso in the sculpture appears to revive the cultural significance for the Chinese viewers of conflating their national identities with the image of the masculine body. Previous studies have thrown some light on Lee’s body by establishing a connection between the body and masculine nationalist discourse (Li 2001; Lu et al. 2014; Tasker 1997). Tasker (1997: 318) accurately describes that in almost all his films Lee “ritualistically removes his jacket” to show off his muscular arms and chest in a such way that “discourses of masculinity and nationhood are complexly bound up together in his star image.” Indeed, the substantial visual impact of all the Lee statues is partly attributed to his impressive torso, which has been “theorized as offering a new model of masculinity” (Bowman 2013: 33). It is the revelation of Lee’s bare torso that marks the assertion of a masculine national identity in his Kung Fu films and that “in many ways (re)produced a naïve form of masculine nationalist discourse radiating from his spectacular body” (Li 2001: 109). Hence, Lee’s body embodies a form of “neo-wu masculinity” (Berry and Farquhar 2006: 202), i.e. a unique representation of the masculine body that is endowed with Chinese national identity against imperialism and colonization.

Yet another Member feature that depicts his significance as an inspiring figure is the sculpting of his gaze – not in a style that is strong and fierce as in the other five public statues in open areas, but in a way that is represented as looking ahead in the distance, seemingly with great vision and insight. The depiction of Lee in this gaze coupled with the commemorative exhibition held in a heritage museum, points to a very real and very keen understanding that through his vision, Lee, as a martial art expert, a film star, and a contemporary philosopher and visionary, has transformed the world of combative arts, the worlds of Asia’s and America’s cinema, and the personal worlds of countless individuals from all walks of life. Expressed through his gaze and his handwritten notes, which visitors are profoundly witness to in this exhibition, Lee’s vision, as Little (2000b: xx) notes, is a vision of “a world of progress, a world free of suffering, and a world of enlightenment unflawed by ignorance, superstition, and corruption,” offering a model of discipline, strength, and wisdom. Bowman (2013: 88; original emphasis) specifically states that Lee’s words and writings have largely been derived from Taoism, Zen, and Buddhism, pointing to “a particular predilection for what might be called ethical truths couched in the form of injunctions: injunctions and imperatives to do with how to live, how to act, how to think, how to proceed, how to be”, all of which can be encapsulated in Lee’s most repeated aphorism “walk on” (Lee and Little 1997: 75). Lee’s words to his son also revolve round this phrase: “I will teach him to walk on. Walk on and he will see a new view. […] Walk on and leave behind all things that would dam up the inlet, or clog the outlet, of experience” (Lee and Little 1997: 46), suggesting perhaps that the phrase “walk on” in Bruce Lee’s philosophy and vision is synonymous with progressive self-betterment as opposed to passive acceptance of circumstances, docility, and inactivity.