ABSTRACT
The contemporary worldwide addiction to the forensic-medical gaze, the power to see both the patterns of brutality inscribed on a body and the moral truths about whodunit, how and why they did it, and sometimes with whom, took a fascinating turn in Peter Chan’s (Chen Kexin 陳可辛) Chinese martial arts film Dragon (2011), hereafter referred to by its Chinese title Wuxia 武侠, ‘Martial Chivalry’. In a brilliant twenty-first century appropriation of both ancient Chinese medical traditions and the much-loved forensic detective genre, Wuxia pushes the martial arts epic in a new direction with a minute visual analysis of the anatomy and physiology of the martial arts body.
