This week in PostMag: Girls with Guns, a trip to Wanfenglin and the peak of Japanese luxury
Dive into Hong Kong action films of yesteryear, take a moped ride through rural Guizhou and bask in the simple refinement of ‘Jaxury’
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.
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.
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.