11/05/2022
When I moved to Mainland China after many years in Hong Kong, I started digging more into the internal schools of Kung-Fu and I started losing interest in what I believed to be Wing Chun. I thought I'd seen all there was to offer there and started to look elsewhere to fill some of the things I thought there were missing in the style. Until I decided to go and check for myself what was practiced in Foshan. And to my surprise, I found a world where people breathe Wing Chun and have a completely different level of understanding of what I was used to in the so-called Traditional Wing Chun practiced in Hong Kong.
Wan sifu's approach is an amazing style and he is an incredible martial artist like few you'll ever meet in your path, and his Wing Chun it's his own interpretation, based on his experience in many different martial arts and fighting experience, that brought him to create something very unique.
What I found in Foshan was something again very different from what I expected, but it made me realize that what arrived in Hong Kong was Grand Master Yip Man interpretation of what he studied in Foshan; yet again, another very unique and interesting approach non the less. But what I found in the birthplace of Wing Chun was the understanding of certain core principles and tactics that I didn't find before and that let me understand the core of this art to a different level. The Wing Chun knowledge and styles in Foshan are vast and deep, yet completely unknown to the majority.
This is not a post about comparing different approaches or claiming one to be better than the other, as each style I've studied has its own strength and weakness, and it's a unique and valid approach. This post is meant instead as an inspiration for someone to go beyond common beliefs and maybe come to the consideration that is difficult to judge without knowing, and that sometimes we look away from something and search for different things instead of trying to go to the source and see what was there, to begin with.
It's a post that tries to be inspiring, as inspiring was for me to meet this incredible martial artist and human being: sifu Gwok Wai Jaam. A man that managed to clarify any doubts I had for years and that managed to bring back the love I had, to even a higher level.
Special thanks go to sifu Jesper Lundqvist and his beautiful and amazingly knowledgable wife Joyce Zhang for the incredible support that gave me, and for the work they are doing to preserve this traditional art and make it survive for the next generations to come. In the hope that many will start looking back at what Wing Chun simply was and had to offer, before looking towards other directions trying to find something that probably was there already, or that wasn't supposed to be there for a reason...
