Yuen Woo-ping at The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art announces a film series, Yuen Woo-ping: The Number One Martial Arts Director Under the Sky, from September 17–October 13, 2026.

In a Hong Kong film industry overflowing with martial arts talent, Yuen Woo-ping stands apart. His legendary influence, in a career spanning more than five decades, has earned him the widely celebrated, industry-bestowed moniker that translates as The Number One Martial Arts Director Under the Sky. As both film director and action choreographer, Yuen helped elevate martial arts cinema into a sophisticated art form, blending technical precision with character, poetry, and astonishing physical invention. His choreography prioritizes movement legibility, spatial clarity, and expressive geometry over brute force, reshaping the visual grammar of global action filmmaking.

Born into a family of Peking Opera performers, Yuen grew up in a tradition where drama, martial arts, acrobatics, and dance were inseparable—a heritage linking him to contemporaries like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. The Yuen siblings began as stunt performers and rose through the ranks, forming the Yuen Clan and becoming some of Hong Kong cinema's most respected stunt performers and action directors.

Yuen's first two films as a director, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master (both 1978), launched Chan's stardom. By shifting martial arts cinema away from solemn violence to wit, personality, and comedic invention, the films established a template for Chan's career. Yuen went on to collaborate with icons like Hung, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, and Donnie Yen, while consistently demonstrating an unparalleled ability to train performers of all backgrounds—including Hollywood stars like Keanu Reeves and Uma Thurman—in his intensive fight camps.

Yuen's work on The Matrix (1999), which seamlessly integrates Hong Kong wirework with science fiction, fundamentally altered how Hollywood approaches action. With Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) he showed that martial arts could deepen a film's emotional and intellectual resonance as much as its spectacle. Yuen's extraordinary adaptability made him the definitive collaborator for visually distinct auteurs as diverse as Stephen Chow, Ang Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Tsui Hark, the Wachowskis, and Wong Kar Wai. Decades after his debut, Yuen's latest epic, Blades of the Guardians (2026), proves his vision still dictates the rhythm of modern action cinema.