Blood in the Ink: Beyond Yin and Yang in Zhang Yimou’s Moving Ink Scroll, Shadow影

Mona Hui

In Zhang Yimou’s Shadow (2018), the court of the kingdom of Pei is draped in monochrome silks, his conspirators whispering in tones of charcoal and ash. Rain slashes across stone courtyards;, ink-like blood pooling under fallen bodies. This is not the Zhang Yimou of Hero (2002), who drenched screens in operatic reds and blues, nor the romantic visionary of House of Flying Daggers (2004), who weaponised silk brocade. Instead, Shadow unfolds like a Song dynasty ink painting sprung to life—a meditation on duality, deception, and the corrosive allure of power. Through its austere palette and balletic violence, the film bridges classical Chinese artistry with wuxia^[1] cinema’s modern reinvention, positions itself as both a homage to tradition and a subversion of Zhang’s own chromatic legacy.

Still from Shadow, 2018

            Zhang Yimou’s earlier Hero (2002) is a film drenched in colour-as-narrative. Each hue—crimson for passion, cerulean for sacrifice – serves as a moral code, externalising the psyche of its characters. The iconic scene of Flying Snow (Feixue) and Moon (Ruyue) duelling amid swirling golden leaves epitomises this approach: colour as spectacle, emotion, and political allegory. Film critics have argued that Hero’s chromatic crescendo, where disparate hues resolve into a unified black-greyish hue epitomised by the King of Qin (later the first emperor of China), mirrors the nation’s historical prioritisation of collective harmony over individual dissent.

Still from Hero, 2002

Shadow inverts this logic. This cinematic world is rendered in ink-wash tones, with colour reserved solely for blood—a visceral rupture in the grayscale order. The film’s protagonist, a wounded commander Ziyu, and his ‘shadow’ (a doppelgänger raised to replace him) exist in a liminal space where loyalty and ambition blur. The monochrome palette, evocative of shanshui landscapes (Chinese traditional ‘mountain-water’ scenery), reflects this moral ambiguity. Where Hero’s colours declaim, Shadow’s voids interrogate. The Pei king’s court, all polished obsidian and marble, becomes a chessboard of shifting alliances, its aesthetic restraint amplifying the tension of whispered plots. Even the Yin-Yang platform, where the climactic duel unfolds, is stripped of colour, its swirling black-and-white motif mirroring the film’s central theme: opposing forces locked in fragile balance.

            Zhang’s rejection of colour here is not mere rebellion of his own aesthetics but, in a sense, a political critique. If Hero’s finale glorifies submission to authority, Shadow’s denouement—a coup drenched in crimson—reveals the hollowness of power. Blood, the only chromatic element, becomes both literal and metaphorical currency, seeping through robes and treaties alike. The absence of colour can, as David Batchelor writes in Chromophobia,  heighten its symbolic potency; in Shadow, red is not just violence but truth, a stark reminder of the human cost of ambition.

Still from Shadow

            The wuxia genre has long been a canvas for cultural mythmaking. Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) reimagined martial arts as poetic flight, its warriors gliding through bamboo forests like ethereal brushstrokes in Chinese landscape paintings. Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers (2004) followed suit, with Zhang Ziyi’s Mei slashing through a kaleidoscope of glamourous brocades. Yet Shadow diverges sharply, grounding its combat in the tactile artistry of ink painting.

Fight sequences in Shadow are choreographed with the precision of calligraphy.[HA5]  Warriors wield bladed umbrellas, their movements echoing the fluidity of a master’s brush—swirls, stabs, and sudden stillness. The rain-soaked battles, filmed in silvery monochrome, resemble ink dispersing in water, each droplet a calculated stroke. This contrasts with Hero’s balletic wirework or Crouching Tiger’s romanticised gravity-defiance. Here, violence is intimate—almost meditative. A duel on the Yin-Yang platform unfolds, not with flying bodies but with  taiji^[2]-like, tense, pivots, each step a negotiation of balance and betrayal.

            Cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding renders every frame a living scroll. Mist-clad mountains loom like classical shanshui backdrops, while costumes—embroidered in gradients of grey—mimic the subdued matiness that resemble the texture of rice paper. The film’s use of negative space, a hallmark of ink painting, forces viewers to confront absence as narrative. A vacant throne room or a shadowed corridor becomes a metaphor for the void at the heart of power, echoing François Cheng’s assertion in Empty and Full that “the blankness in Chinese art is not emptiness but potential.”

In a film where colour is taboo, blood becomes a transgressive act. Blood here is visceral, unadorned—a reminder that violence begets violence. The fatal fight between opponent Yang Ping and princess Qingping epitomises a monochrome ink-wash painting with a hint of red: Qingping and her robes soaked in the pouring rain and crimson rivulets—shocking not just for their violence but their vividness. Blood, in Shadow, is order’s antithesis— this deliberate rupture of the monochrome order mirrors a broader pondering and interrogation upon authoritarianism.

In a way, Shadow marks Zhang’s reckoning with his own legacy. Shadow turns inwards to embrace cultural specificity, while Hero and House of Flying Daggers courted global audiences with accessible spectacle. Zhang’s shift from colour-as-allegory to monochrome-as-mirror reflects a wider disillusionment. Where Hero’s climax glorifies unity under authority, Shadow’s finale—a blood-drenched coup—reveals the futility of ambition. The film’s aesthetic restraint becomes political critique: its grayscale world as canvas for cycles of betrayal.

The film lingers, like the void in a shanshui landscape, its silence echoing louder than any battle cry—a reminder that sometimes, the most profundity lies in what is unseen, unsaid, and uncoloured.

Still from Shadow

Film source: Yimou, Zhang 張藝謀. Shadow 影. Produced by Tencent Pictures, Perfect World Pictures, Village Entertainment, and LeVision Pictures. 2018. 116 minutes.  

^[1] Wuxia 武俠, literally means ‘martial chivalry’ or ‘martial heroes’, is a genre of Chinese fiction and film centred on the adventures of chivalrous martial artists in ancient China. It blends martial arts, fantasy, and philosophical themes to explore honour, justice, and personal freedom and so on.

^[2] Taiji 太極, literally translates as ‘supreme’ (tai) and ‘extremity’ (ji), is a term derives from the Chinese Daoist philosophy. It suggests the primordial, undifferentiated state of unity from which all existence emerges. It is the source of the complementary forces Yin 陰 (passive, dark, receptive) and Yang 陽 (active, light, creative), which arise from Taiji's dynamic interplay to generate the myriad phenomena of the universe. Taiji embodies the harmonious interdependence of opposites. Though Yin and Yang emerge from it, they remain interconnected, constantly transforming and balancing each other within the whole.