Legacy | Bruce Lee

Half a century after his death,
Bruce Lee's influence continues

Situated in a 20 square metre loft in Metro Centre, Kowloon Bay, the Bruce Lee Club's office is filled with Bruce Lee-related memorabilia, including small sculptures of his classical movements in his films, T-shirts, books and badges. The desk in the middle is a little messy, lined with letters, meeting notes and books - this is also the office of Wong Yiu Keung, founder and chairman of the Club.

There are many Bruce Lee-related collections and books in the Bruce Lee Club in Kowloon Bay

Wong Yiu Keung, founder and chairman of the Bruce Lee Club, founded the club in 1995.

With over 600 members and a history of nearly 30 years, this association is the largest organisation in Hong Kong associated with Bruce Lee, a Hong Kong and American actor, martial artist, and philosopher. It still holds regular events today.

“Despite his death 50 years ago, Bruce Lee's influence continues to this day,” said Wong Yiu Keung, 54.

This superstar died in Kowloon Town because of brain swelling, some said it is because of kidney dysfunction now, without warning, at the age of 32 on June 20, 1973. Half a century has passed, and he has gone from star to icon.

Besides the Club, the bronze statue of Bruce Lee standing in Tsim Sha Tsui and the Bruce Lee Way that encircles Hong Kong, the permanent Bruce Lee exhibition at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and the dozens of Bruce Lee focus groups on Facebook, all demonstrate the ‘legacy’ of Bruce Lee left, both physically and mentally, on the city and its residents.

Wong became a big fan of Bruce Lee in his adolescence. After watching several martial arts films starring Bruce Lee from 1971 to 1973, he was drawn to the robust and righteous characters played by Bruce Lee and fantasised about becoming just like the superstar.

Just as children today worship superheroes like Iron Man and Spider-Man, "At that time, Bruce Lee was my superhero, the one I emulated," said Wong.

At that time, he would watch Bruce Lee's films over and over again, imitating the character's movements and even remembering every line.

Growing into adulthood, Wong's admiration for Bruce Lee expanded from Lee’s heroic exploits in movies to his real-life career achievements, such as his success in film production, martial arts development, and his unique philosophy of exploring and expressing himself.

After returning to Hong Kong from the United States to further his career, he acted in five films over a two-year period, The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, Enter the Dragon and Game of Death, the last of which he died after completing the action sequences. In just four and a half films, the Hong Kong film revenue record was broken three times. His influence spread overseas, and a trend of kung fu films was created in Hollywood. He was also the founder of Jeet Kune Do, a martial art that emphasizes practicality and was treated to pave the way for modern mixed martial arts, MMA.

“It took him just four and a half films to change the world's perception of the Chinese," Wong said. "In his short life, he could do everything to the best of his ability.”

Driven by this sentiment, Wong began collecting Bruce Lee-related objects, such as his posters and martial arts books. However, he did not have many like-minded friends in the beginning.

Wong was a keen collector of Bruce Lee related memorabilia from his youth

This was the case until 1994, when Wong gained some wealth by working as a businessman, which was still his profession now, he advertised his desire to acquire Bruce Lee-related collectibles on the advertising page of Easy Finder, a local Chinese magazine. Shortly afterward, someone called him up and asked what he had in his collection. Wong asked those people out to meet, chat and share their possessions, and over time these enthusiasts of Bruce Lee became good friends.

A few weeks after the advertisement ran, a journalist from the magazine said he wanted to learn more about Wong’s collections and write a story about him, and Wong invited two newly met friends to join him for this interview.

The article received an overwhelming response after its publication. The magazine publisher took the opportunity to advertise the formation of a Bruce Lee fan club, yet Wong had no idea about it, the quota of 300 was quickly filled. Wong was approached by the magazine to become the head of the fan club.

“I was surprised at first,” Wong said. Then he learned that the magazine was also well-intentioned as they did not ask for money and other payback, so he accepted the invitation. “The process of forming the club was quite interesting,” he added.

Wong still keeps the advertisement of that year

When the club was founded, it had been 22 years since Bruce Lee's death. Wong believes that this period has "kept people who really liked Bruce Lee and made people aware of how good Bruce Lee was".

In the first few years of the club's existence, Wong organised gatherings to share their views on Bruce Lee, held exhibitions and rented documentaries of Lee to watch with the group. Until today, Wong still misses those good old days as members of the club were like a family.

The number of members has doubled since its establishment. Bruce Lee Club's income is generated by charging an annual membership fee, in recent years it is HK$300. The more significant source of earnings is from exhibitions and helping others to hold events.

As chairman of the club, Wong often has to pay for the Club's expenses using his own income. He has covered the rental fee of the Club in recent years as the club cannot hold any big events under the government’s restrictions during the pandemic, so there was little income.

“I am willing to devote all my time outside of work to the affairs of this club,” he said.

Wong's hard work has been recognised by members. Shannon Ma Fu-keung, an Honorary Advisor of the club and illustrator, said that Wong seems to have made the work of the Bruce Lee Club his full-time job.

Ma won a US animation award in 1998 for producing Bruce Lee still alive, the first animated short film featuring this movie star. Since then, he has become famous and has even given talks in Japan. Even though he was already an 'expert' on Bruce Lee, producing Bruce Lee's paintings or animations only accounted for 30% of his income. His main job is to produce advertising illustrations.

“I work at my job to earn a living before I can enjoy my hobby, but he made his hobby a job,” Ma said. “I admire his efforts.”

The most important thing Wong and members have done is donate a two-metre tall bronze statue of Bruce Lee in 2005, in which his toes on the ground, knees bent, left hand over the chest, right hand and right leg outstretched towards the enemy - a classic move in Lee’s combat. The sculpture is now located at the entrance to the Avenue of Stars in Tsim Sha Tsui and has become one of Hong Kong's landmarks.

Many visitors come to the sculpture of Bruce Lee to take photos

Wong said that in this project with the government, the purchase and donation of the bronze statue was led by the Bruce Lee Club. To build this statue, the club had to publicly raise money from society for the first time.

In recent years, as the initial members have become older and the overall social pressures in Hong Kong have increased, activities within the Club have become progressively less well-attended, despite the increase in membership, according to Wong. So he shifted the focus of the club's activities and began to think more about how he could increase the influence of Bruce Lee in the Hong Kong community as a whole.

The work of the Bruce Lee Club in recent years has resulted in the establishment of the Bruce Lee Way in collaboration with the government, a pathway related to the trail of Bruce Lee's life in Hong Kong, including the places where he studied and filmed his films during his lifetime.

Besides, for more than a decade, Wong made lots of efforts to preserve Bruce Lee's former home at 41 Cameron Road, Kowloon Tong. He wanted to turn it into a tourist attraction for people from all over the world to visit. Yet, the cottage was eventually demolished in 2019 because of a lack of government support and the official's claim that the building was too old to be restored.

“Not being able to preserve Bruce Lee's home has been my greatest regret since I founded the club,” Wong said.

Before the mansion was demolished, Wang and his colleagues went to the house to take measurements. Later, he tried to make up by harnessing the power of technology to replicate Bruce Lee's house using VR technology. The audience can experience an isometric scale restoration of Bruce Lee's residence simply by wearing VR glasses. The project is still in progress and Wong plans to open it to the public on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Bruce Lee's death.

In these years, Wong has devoted more to the affairs of the Bruce Lee Club as he has no children and does not know how to find a suitable successor to carry on the Club's legacy.

"I can only do as much as I can now, as I'm getting old and don’t know how long I can still maintain this association," Wong said.

Before the establishment of the Bruce Lee Club, the city lacked the attractions associated with the international star. After the partnership with the club, and especially seeing the strong appeal of the Bruce Lee statue to visitors, the government has taken Bruce Lee more seriously as a calling card.

“Perhaps without Wong and the club, Bruce Lee would not have been as popular as he is today,” Ma said. “When he died, he was a superstar, but today, he has been an icon.”

“When he died, he was a superstar,

but today, he has been an icon.”

—— Shannon Ma Fu-keung, honorary advisor of the Bruce Lee Club

Except for the failure of preserving the mansion, looking back on all the jobs they have done, Wong regrets that Hong Kong does not have a permanent exhibition of Bruce Lee.

Yet, though there is still no perpetual Bruce Lee exhibition in the city, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum has had a long-term pavilion on him.

From 2013 to 2020, the museum collaborated with the Bruce Lee Foundation, an organisation founded by Lee’s wife and daughter, and held a display named Bruce Lee: Kung Fu - Art - Life, which was popular among visitors and residents. More than 3.7 million people visited it, according to Carmen Wong Ka Man, curator of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.

After the great success of the exhibition, the two institutions worked together again and organised another exhibition in 2021, whose theme is A Man Beyond the Ordinary: Bruce Lee, which is expected to end in 2026.

“There was so much we wanted to say in the first exhibition that we were eager to hold a second one,” said Carmen Wong.

According to her, in the preparation of the second exhibition, the core concept was "to use the small stories behind the exhibits to learn about what made Bruce Lee a legend".

They have a number of Bruce Lee related artefacts on display, such as Bruce Lee's nunchucks, film production manuscripts, letters, and the classic yellow tracksuit, an outfit that has been shown by many film characters.

During the preparation of the exhibition, Wong, as the curator, is excited

To give visitors a better understanding of Bruce Lee, many multimedia elements and interactive media are used. The exhibition features a restored script designed by Bruce Lee, colouring in sketched scenes, a game console and a simulated martial arts trainer based on Bruce Lee, and an immersive installation named Self ▪ Martial Arts ▪ Emptiness created by three local artists, including Shannon Ma Fu-keung showing Bruce Lee's philosophy. Visitors can stand in the middle of a 20-square-metre exhibition hall and enjoy a 360-degree visual and audio experience with him at “close quarters”.

“As staff members, we ourselves love this exhibition so much because of the many possibilities it holds and because we all adore Bruce Lee,” Carmen Wong said.

During the production of the short film, Ma did not use the motion capture technique commonly used in live-action related animation, a method of having real people do the movements and record them to make the characters more realistic, as he said Bruce Lee's movements were "so powerful" that no one could imitate the essence.

For his part, Ma had to create two different periods of Bruce Lee sparring, for which he carefully watched Lee's video material and constantly modified the movements of the characters. In the end, it took him a year to complete the five-minute section of the microfilm he was responsible for.

According to Wong, Hong Kong was important to Bruce Lee because it was the place where he was introduced to martial arts and made his film classics. At the same time, Bruce Lee also influenced Hong Kong by using martial arts to take the city to the world and change the way others perceive the Chinese.

The exhibition uses many multimedia elements

"He's a star having influence all around the world, but more importantly it's his excellent qualities that make him a star," Wong said.

Francis Chui Yin Kan, chief instructor and president of Jeet Kune Do Hong Kong Instructors Association, has experienced Bruce Lee's influence overseas on more than once.

He said when he went to the United States to learn martial arts in 1998, many people would raise their thumbs up when they learned he was from Hong Kong and said, "Oh, Bruce Lee".

Lee was treated to revolutionise the culture of the United States, a country where the Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943. Research has shown that he changed the traditional image of the Chinese as sinister and weak in Hollywood films and sparked the kung fu movie craze in the United States.

“Bruce Lee's influence allows me to proudly say I am Chinese in foreign countries,” Chui said.

Naomi Waithera Chan, an Australian traveller, set the exhibition as one of her destinations when she toured Hong Kong because her mom in Kenya is a big fan of Bruce Lee and Chinese kung fu.

“We watched his movies decades ago and knew he is from Hong Kong,” she said. “The exhibition was cool and gave me more insight into the man himself.”

“Bruce Lee's influence allows me to proudly say I am Chinese in foreign countries,”

—— Francis Chui Yin Kan, chief instructor of Jeet Kune Do Hong Kong Instructors Association

Naomi Waithera Chan, an Australian tourist, comes to the exhibition because of her mom’s love for Bruce Lee.

So far, the second exhibition has received more than 300,000 visitors. Wong expects more foreign tourists to come as Hong Kong has scrapped its travelling restrictions on COVID-19.

Apart from the Bruce Lee Club and the display, around the dozen active Bruce Lee discussion groups on Facebook also reflect his continuing influence to this day. The one with the highest number of followers has reached over 230,000 users all over the world. The discussion groups are diverse, with general Bruce Lee fans, some following his films, some focusing on his martial arts skills, and some even just sharing his words.

In the Chinese discussion forum, which is mainly composed of Hong Kong users, the number of users has also reached 14,000.

Demian Lai, 56, the Visual Storyteller of the Chinese Facebook group related to Bruce Lee, keeps posting his colouring works of Bruce Lee’s old black and white photos and receives many likes.

Lai has coloured over 1,000 old pictures of Bruce Lee

He first knew Bruce Lee when he was in primary school and The Green Hornet was broadcast on Hong Kong television. He and his classmates around him thought that Bruce Lee was even more handsome as Kato than the main character.

After Lee returned to Hong Kong to star in his first film, The Big Boss, Lai admired him even more. “His martial arts skills, and even his body shape, amazed me,” Lai said.

Like Wong Yiu Keung, Lai also tried to imitate Bruce Lee's movements, hairstyle and lines. He even converted his family’s mopping stick into a nunchaku.

At the time of Lee's sudden death, Lai was in secondary school, in a state of confusion and ignorance. Out of his love for Bruce Lee, he regularly bought newspapers and magazines about Lee to find inspiration from his idol. After all the social gossip surrounding Lee's death, a magazine called the Bruce Lee Jeet Kune Do Research Society caught Lai's attention as it regularly published quality content related to Bruce Lee's martial arts and philosophy. Through his long-term reading, Lai realised that Lee was not only a physically fit star, but also a man of many virtues with high expectations of himself.

Learning from Bruce Lee, Lai set high standards and exacting demands on himself and tried to learn philosophy to understand Bruce Lee's words, as he knew Lee learned philosophic knowledge at university and was good at it.

The principles of the universe behind philosophy and Lai's exploration of himself led him to discover his interest, which led him to choose physics at university. After graduation, he became a secondary school teacher, keeps imparting his experience to younger generations.

“If I had not been influenced by his words to pursue my true self, I would not have achieved all that I have now,” he said.

Because of his gratitude to Bruce Lee, he started sharing Bruce Lee related reports or interview videos on social media, such as Youtube and Facebook, about ten years ago, and sometimes, he also uses Photoshop to embellish old black and white photos to share with Lee’s fans.

By chance, he saw someone on a Bruce Lee discussion group containing mainly Europeans and Americans, who had painted old photos and found the colouring very vivid and appealing. In order to make more people aware of and attracted to Bruce Lee, Lai also started to colourise and share Lee’s classic photos.

He insisted on painting the old photographs and received a lot of praise. Many private collectors have come forward to purchase Lai's work, while others have shared their black and white photographs and asked Lai to make those photos colourised.

Up to now, Lai has coloured around 1,000 old pictures of Bruce Lee.

Even though he has developed fasciitis, a painful hand condition, from handling the mouse too much, he still insists on posting his work two or three times a week because he has made colouring a habit.

On July 20 this year, the 50th anniversary of Bruce Lee's death, Lai intends to commemorate that day with a photograph he has restored for Bruce Lee.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong Heritage Museum will open a function place on its ground floor and display a special exhibition whose theme is Classic to be Continued: Bruce Lee. The main content will be the change in Hong Kong Pop Culture because of Bruce Lee, according to Carmen Wong Ka Man.

As the chairman of the Bruce Lee Club, Wong Yiu Keung plans to hold an art gallery showing paintings made by Ma Fu-keung. He also wants to finish restoring Bruce Lee's former residence through VR and leads members of the club to Thailand, where The Big Boss was shot, for a visit.