"Everyone has a different opinion of what good Wing Chun is, depending on their needs or on what they learned a long time ago. They think that Wing Chun doesn’t change and tend to follow the natural way of things. If you follow history you can’t keep up with evolution—we always have to move forward—we can’t go backwards I’m afraid! That’s why I don’t understand when people talk about the “original” Wing Chun and why they want to keep it as it was so many years ago. If you learned it in the past, you have to look at what you didn’t learn so well. You need to improve it and make it more useful for modern applications. That’s why I evolved the techniques and the style I learnt myself, in order to make the system, on the whole, more complete. History is for you to study but you shouldn’t remain there, you need to move forward or you will soon become extinguished. That’s why you need to keep updating your knowledge—and that’s the same with anything in life. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be the same for Wing Chun. I can’t say other Wing Chun styles are no good, it’s just that most of them don’t focus on improvement and some don’t even focus on the good things that they have. If you focus on it, your Gung Fu will always improve as a result. Bruce Lee invented Jeet Kune Do because he was really fast, but nowadays there are many people that are faster than him. That’s why you can’t say that the Gung Fu of the older generation was better. Maybe it was just because they had a lot more time and fewer distractions. The system was also more closed, but nowadays you can compare because you can see exactly what the others do. We always have to strive for perfection so the technique can overcome sheer power. I don’t say that we have the best system in place, but I can say that many Wing Chun practitioners are very close-minded and conservative."
-- Spread of our cover interview with Sifu Wan Kam Leung from the upcoming Issue No. 14 (on sale October 18).#WingChunIllustrated #WanKanLeung#WingChun #PracticalWingChun
