Description:

Lee Bruce



Bruce Lee Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute Membership Card with Outstanding Provenance

 

A blank Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute membership card once gifted from martial artist and film actor Bruce Lee (1940-1973), ca. 1968. The card has a cream background emblazoned with a red and gold logo of Lee's martial arts style, Jeet Kune Do, at center. In near fine condition, 3.625" x 2.5". Provenance: Bruce Lee gifted this to close friend Herb Jackson, who in turn gave it to his son, Mark Ashton-Jackson. Accompanied by a photocopy of the original Letter of Authenticity signed by Mark Ashton-Jackson dated May 25, 2018.

 

Students enrolled at Lee's kwoon, or school, would have filled out this membership card with pertinent details like rank, year, and quarter. The name of Lee's school, Jun Fan Gung Fu, translates roughly to "Bruce Lee's Kung Fu Institute." The completed card would have been signed by the student's instructor as well as by Lee, who served as the school's founder and President.

 

Lee opened two branches of his Institute in Seattle and Oakland in the early 1960s. Lee's teaching was firmly entrenched in wing chun, a style of Southern Chinese kung fu. Lee developed a close personal friendship with  Herb Jackson, one of his pupils from the California branch. Jackson became one of Lee's workout partners and even made safety modifications to some of Lee's training equipment.

 

The copy of the Letter of Authenticity reads in part: "I, Mark Ashton-Jackson, state that this item was owned and used by Bruce Lee, the legendary martial arts and action film star. This item was given to my father Herb Jackson as a gift from Bruce Lee in and around 1968. My father Herb Jackson was a very close friend and confidant of Bruce Lee and was also one of his private backyard students in Los Angeles in the mid to late 1960s…"

 

In July 1967, Bruce Lee founded his own martial arts style and philosophy called Jeet Kune Do. The modified taijitu symbol appearing on the membership card, inspired by the ancient yin-yang representing perpetuity and continuance, served as a logo for his new martial arts style and is a registered trademark held by the Bruce Lee Estate.

 

Lee had felt restricted by traditional martial arts rules; Jeet Kune Do eliminated them. As an instructor, Lee not only allowed but encouraged his students to fight with the spontaneity, ingenuity, and abandon that you would encounter in real street fighting. Jeet Kune Do has been alternately described as "the style of no style," "the art of fighting without fighting," and "minimal movement with maximum effect." Jeet Kune Do combined elements of martial arts, boxing, fencing, and other athletic forms. Around this time, Lee's wholistic attitude towards health and wellness coalesced and informed his later training.

 

Bruce Lee's training schools, innovative martial arts philosophy, and feature-length films did much to popularize martial arts in the mid-century United States. Born Lee Jun-fan in San Francisco but raised in Hong Kong, the teenager had relocated to the United States to avoid growing gang violence in the British colony. Lee, who had studied martial arts primarily as self-defense, started teaching kung fu in the United States in 1959. This was somewhat controversial as martial arts traditionalists maintained that non-Chinese should not be trained.

 

Lee died prematurely at age 32. His feature-length films, some of which were acted in, written, and directed by him, include: The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), Way of the Dragon (1972), Enter the Dragon (1973), and The Game of Death (1978, posthumous.)

 



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