2 days ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
This week in PostMag: Girls with Guns, a trip to Wanfenglin and the peak of Japanese luxury
Before she was an Oscar winner, Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng was flying through glass panels and landing kicks in cult Hong Kong action films, shot without doubles, rewrites or much in the way of safety precautions.
Somehow I missed that part of her career until now. In our cover feature, Sean Tierney dives into the wild, improvisational heyday of late 1980s and early 90s Hong Kong action, when the industry's 'get it done' ethos collided with an era of boundless energy, in a genre aptly named Girls with Guns.
The under-appreciated category is many things: kitsch, camp and groundbreaking. Sometimes grim, always unapologetic. The plot is loose, the dialogue questionable, but the thrill is real – women defying gravity, expectations and (probably) every rule in the insurance handbook. Needless to say, I know what I'm planning for our next family movie night.
Elsewhere in the issue, we ask what luxury looks like when the shine is swapped for soul. In Tokyo, Gavin Yeung checks into the Palace Hotel's Jaxury suite, where a hinoki-wood tissue box – assembled without a single nail – feels more extravagant than a bottle of Dom Pérignon.
It's all part of a government-backed initiative called Jaxury that tries, rather valiantly, to define what Japanese luxury really means. The result is a philosophy that favours intimacy over ostentation and the handmade over the high-gloss. It may be a tourism push dressed up in academic language, but even so, I find the premise compelling. Jaxury isn't just about aesthetics, it's a kind of manifesto for living: deliberate, detailed, quiet in all the right places.
From Japan's lacquered restraint we ride to Guizhou's Wanfenglin, where Marco Ferrarese revs up his e-scooter through karst peaks and rice paddies. No roaring engine, no Instagram scrum, just the hum of an electric motor and the luxury of getting a little lost. It reminded me of a trip through Yunnan province in the summer of 2020, riding a rented scooter through provincial back roads with a feeling of freedom strangely out of step with China's closed borders at the time.
