THE ART OF BOXING
The Art of Boxing
First in a four-part series of interviews with Michael Acton, Founder and Chairman of Wu Shi Taiji Quan and Qi Gong Association.
“It was self-preservation!” Michael laughs, describing Karate classes at Goldsmiths college, where he studied fine art. Karate was his first foray into martial arts, and as a long-haired art student living in East London in the early ‘70s, a bit of self-protection went a long way.
Today, after many years of practice and study, Michael is a fifth generation Wu Style Taiji Quan and Qi Gong disciple of Master Li Li Qun of Shanghai. He is also himself a master of both Taiji Quan boxing and Therapeutic Qi Gong. His Chinese boxing is convincing, and he spends much of his time passing on the skills gained from over forty years of practice to his students at the Wu Shi Taiji Quan Association, which he founded in 2006.
It is here that we meet, sitting on the punch bags which edge the studio floor. After repeated pestering, Michael has agreed to tell me, one of his Association’s many students, about the journey which led him from English church halls through India, Malaysia and Thailand to China.
Michael has always fascinated me. It’s not just his energy, clarity, or the easy way he deals with the unexpected. It’s the effect that his qualities have on me. When he’s speaking, my ability to concentrate is elevated. A small correction, and the exercise I’ve been struggling with for weeks makes sense. He describes seaweed moving in the ocean, and my movements find softness. So I’m keen to ask the things I’ve always wondered, about the art of teaching and learning, the mysteries of transmission, and how he reached such a high level of skill.
We move backwards and forwards in time, from clubbing with the New Romantics in late ‘70s London, to Taiji in Shanghai’s parks at dawn. There is a period as Director of an International branding consultancy spanning London, Singapore and Taiwan, then suddenly we are in India’s Dharamsala, drinking tea at the Dalai Lama’s palace. Like the Wu Style Taiji form he teaches, Michael’s story traces a path which expands out then gathers in, drifts to the left, then spins through a series of unfolding spirals.
Returning to Karate, Michael admits it didn’t hold his interest for long. On moving to West London he spent time hovering round the Japanese Budokwai on Fulham Road checking out Judo and Aikido, reading Alan Watts, Eugene Herigell and the root teachings of Daoism from Lao Tze and Chuang Tze. Attracted by the mysteries of Daoism, around 1975 he began studying Yang Style Taiji Quan in the old Chelsea Town Hall, and received his first introduction to Taiji Quan Form and techniques. At that time in London, Taiji Quan was in its infancy, with few significant and genuinely knowledgeable teachers. Still searching for authenticity, Michael finally followed an advert in a church hall in Earl’s Court, which led him to Simon Seow (Seow Poon Shing). Seow was a Wu stylist from Malaysia and Michael’s first significant teacher of Taiji Quan. It was Michael’s entry into the Wu Style that he came to love.
“When I saw him do the form… it was magical. It was just, beautiful. I thought ‘wow, that’s definitely for me. It had a poetry about it, a raw beauty, and you could see it had substance in terms of functional value… When I saw this guy I thought, I could do this. That’s what I want to learn.”
Michael studied with Seow for around five years, while running his own design partnership based in Chelsea. When I ask about his early days as a designer, and the club scene he was involved in, he says, “It was brilliant! Mental! It was a wild time…” So where did this leave his Taiji practice?
“I kept returning to the Taiji… It was full on, because work involved the kind of people that partied a lot and clubbed a lot, and I was involved in that world. So there were two sides to the coin and I had to keep it balanced. Of course there were times when it slipped and there were times when it got recovered.”
As well as the competing demands of a busy working life and the pull towards practice, there was also a tension between Michael’s passion for art and the increasing attraction of Taiji Quan. Eventually, he reached a turning point. “There was something in me which said: it’s time to move on from this, because it’s not what I want,” he says simply. After leaving behind a growing and successful design partnership, there followed a nomadic period of wandering, often without a teacher. He managed some intermittent training with old Taiji friends, all the while keeping up his personal practice of both Taiji Quan and meditation. He must have been extremely disciplined to maintain this without a teacher, I suggest.
“It was a lifeline, it was an anchor. Without it I think I could have imploded, with the pressure of work and managing the social scenario I was involved in. And then you’ve got relationships… the whole texture of life, the complexity, sometimes you’re wading through the mud and sometimes you’re walking on the high ground… I came to realise that the Taiji was the thread that held it all together, that held me together, so this was strong. I started giving it a lot more recognition. It started gaining a power that was not just practice, not just doing it for fitness or self defence or whatever, it started gaining a different kind of strength and becoming an integral part of my understanding of who I was, along with my perception of me as a creative person, as an artist primarily. I started increasing the value I gave to [Taiji] because by its own nature, it started pulling a lot more on me.”
After a prolonged period of travelling, firstly in Africa, then India, then Malaysia – reconnecting with Simon Seow for further study in Kuala Lumpur. Michael returned to London in the early 1980s, finding himself restless and uncertain about his future. In the mid 1980s Michael encountered Fu Hua, the first Taiji practitioner he had met from mainland China, and a man who combined both his passions.
“A martial artist and an artist, so right up my street! He became the person that reignited a very powerful interest in me, because I saw something in him that was very special; somehow to do with the combination of his Taiji and his art. He was a very beautiful artist, and he painted in a style that was very typical of a school of painting that came from Shanghai which I was interested in, so in a sense he ticked many boxes of what I was finding difficult to reconcile in myself.”
Michael’s training with Fu Hua was tough. Primarily a Shaolin boxer, Fu Hua had also studied Hsing Yi Quan, Ba Gua Chang and Yang Style Taiji Quan, all from excellent sources. His Taiji Quan came directly from a disciple of the legendary Yang Cheng Fu. He had come to England after suffering during the Cultural Revolution in China, including a period imprisoned in an agricultural labour camp. Fu Hua accepted only seven or eight trainees, schooling them in Yang Cheng Fu’s style of Taiji, Hsing Yi and Ba Gua. Michael describes the three hours of weekly training as “heavy duty training, it was full on… very intense. You had to be fit and strong to sustain it.” Curious, I ask more about Hsing Yi and Ba Gua, which I know nothing about.
“Hsing Yi and Ba Gua are two extremes, in a sense. Ba Gua has an incredibly strong requirement for deep stretching and the ability to be extremely flexible, and Hsing Yi, the ability to be very powerful and rooted, and able to use your body mass in particular ways. So the way of developing the body was quite different, and Taiji held the secret of the two. So Taiji was the fulcrum upon which Hsing Yi and Ba Gua seemed to operate. I didn’t understand it at the time but within the Taiji, later, as I practised it, I discovered the Ba Gua and also the Hsing Yi. So for me Taiji became a kind of balancing act between the two.”
After Fu Hua left the UK for Australia, Michael found himself without a teacher again, now “deeply in the camp of Chinese boxing methods and systems,” but unable to find another compatible teacher in England that would satisfy him, despite visiting several prominent teachers at the time. I ask him what it was about Fu Hua that appealed so much.
“Fu Hua was mainland Chinese, very distinctive in its pragmatic and hardcore approach. He was old school Kung Fu, he’d learned the old way and he taught it the old way, and he was severe and demanding.”
And you were looking for more of that? I ask doubtfully.
“I think it impressed me so much, it really impacted upon some ascetic part of me that wanted to get to a severe place in the training, to somehow explore those peripheral places that normally you don’t go to in practice.”
He sounds pretty tough, I say.
“He was a tough guy, but he was also an artist. An artist tough guy! I learned a lot about physical skill and the essential requirements of real Kung Fu, of Kung Fu proper, how the body should function, how you need to coordinate in certain ways, how to develop soft power… But what I really learned from him, which was the key to what was going on, was the aspect of spirit and intention. He was so capable in terms of elevating or embodying his spirit and intention in his physical movement, that I hadn’t seen anything like that before in Taiji boxing or Kung Fu… I’d never seen any western person or any person in England I’d been near who could manifest anything like the level of mind intimidation or sheer focus that he could bring it.”
Listening to Michael talk about his teachers is like hearing a sommelier discuss wine, or a jeweller talk about gemstones. A scrupulous attention to provenance and landscape, mixed with deep appreciation for something rare and precious.
“When I saw him practice it was like, this is unreal, how he moves, how he appears, there is more than the sum of the parts, and just the intention. These are subtle things, in a sense. I’m trying not to make it too marvellous and incredible… We’re not talking about sitting at the foot of a Buddha here, we’re talking about a man who’d spent his life studying art and Kung Fu, and somehow had blended them in a way that allowed him to be a really beautiful artist, producing really beautiful imagery, but also practice his Kung Fu in a way that was pretty staggering when you saw it. When you came into close contact with him, you could feel his energy. But his energy was developed, I realised, not just through his Kung Fu but also through the life experiences he had had… his resilience had established him as a kind of immovable mountain. He had somehow been able to manage his mental and physical world through extraordinary hardships that would probably destroy most people, but he had managed to be able to gather it together and, you know, that’s how I see him. Maybe he’d laugh if he heard me say that, and say, don’t talk rubbish!”
We both laugh, the presence of Fu Hua suddenly closer, and I glance up at the photographs of Michael’s teachers and lineage, looking down at us from the studio wall. He adds that it was Fu Hua who oriented him increasingly eastwards.
“He made me think, I can’t have any more of this English Taiji, people not knowing this and not knowing that and making it up. I’ve got to go to China to see this stuff.”
The story is only just beginning, but we’re way over time, the battery light flashing on my digital recorder. I persuade Michael to consider a second interview, and look again at the photographs of his two main teachers, Masters Li Li Qun and Liu Ji Fa. Meeting them will have to wait until next time.
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Interview by Esther Cann, member of the Wu Shi Taiji Quan and Qi Gong Association