Welcome to the Storyverse: Payhuan Peter Shiao for Immortal Studios

Awaken your hero

Immortal line-up. Welcome to an ever-expanding universe of characters centred around the Wuxia genre.

As founder, creator and CEO of Immortal Studios Payhuan Peter Shiao has set out to build an all-new story universe. With a decades-long career leading innovative entertainment and media ventures between the East and West, he has also been active in empowering underserved communities, now aiming to deliver a similar mission for social transformation through stories. With this creator-led, AI-powered, and fan-driven entertainment company — reimagining the ancient Chinese genre of Wuxia for the global stage — Payhuan has also gained exclusive rights to the literary works of his father, Shiao Yi, who is widely regarded as one of the top creators in modern Wuxia. It is with this incredible foundation he has built a slate of original, interconnected IPs, building the first true Wuxia Storyverse for today’s audiences.

Ahead of “The Hero Re-Awakens” — a live multimedia celebration of Wuxia in Los Angeles — Payhuan recently sat down to talk more about Immortal Studios’ vision and where it all began…

You grew up as an avid reader of Chinese Wuxia novels. Tell us more about your father’s influence as an accomplished author in the genre.

It really did start with my father’s influence. It was what was in the ether of my home and the topic of our dinner conversations. He was not trying to get me into his business per se, nor was he actually very supportive of me having a creative career initially because he knew how difficult it was — especially in America. But ultimately, I ended up where I was supposed to be.

Immortal spirit. RIght: Payhuan at NeueHouse Madison Square.

Where does the love of comic books come from or is this via another partner/arm in the venture, expanding on the other forms of media at Immortal Studios?

My love of comics started in junior high school when I discovered X-men and Wolverine — but my first real love was the indie title Elf Quest. I was also reading a lot of comics from Hong Kong at the time. I never had the idea that I would go into publishing myself, but a light bulb went off when I was deeply frustrated by the expense and time that it took to make movies, and it has been deeply fulfilling to be able to take all those passions for storytelling and to produce comics first.

“… stories have the ability to shape who and what we are.”

— Payhuan Peter Shiao

I love how articulate and focused you are in delivering your Immortal message. What do you feel is the true power of storytelling?

I believe the true power of storytelling is the ability to share, empathically engage and communicate very powerful things from ideas, emotions, points of view and “truths” all within a creative container that is non-threatening and now on-demand. So, stories have the ability to shape who and what we are. Now, in a quantum physics sense, our material existence is held together by thoughts and ideas, stories… if you will. It shows that, in a very real way, we are held together by stories.

Summing up in a sentence, how would you demystify Immortal Studios?

A purposeful storytelling engine committed to empowering our audience so that they can be the heroes that they’ve been waiting for.

Immortal art. The studio already boasts an array of comic book titles written and illustrated by talented creatives.

When did the Storyverse begin?

I would say about ten years ago when I started to weave in all the arcs, characters, and themes that I had been wrestling with for quite some time and finally started to take tangible form. It all came together rather organically once I became clear about what I really wanted to build and to share. Then I started to weave all of it together… and this became the “Storyverse.”

“In my own life, some of the most creative ideas were not “thought” but presented themselves when there was sufficient openness and relaxation…”

— Payhuan Peter Shiao

Meditation is important to you and seems like a crucial part of the creative process. In terms of building stories that acknowledge mental health, how crucial do you feel meditation is in discovering ideas?

From a Kung Fu point of view — in the authentic tradition — mediation is the foundation of that form of martial art. Any kind of real mastery where mastering our thoughts/mind is the most fundamental. In my own life, some of the most creative ideas were not “thought” but presented themselves when there was sufficient openness and relaxation, which is one of the key deliverables of meditation.

Immortal history. The Shaolin Monastery represents a strong symbol for the martial arts community. Chinese Wuxia-style novels and later post-war Hong Kong cinema helped to spread myths and legends around the famous warriors of the Shaolin Monastery. "A brief history of Shaolin Monastery in Henan" (Nico, 2020)

Following on from this, the “art of inspiration” is a crucial therapy the world needs right now, surely, as technology impacts on thought processes. What are your “thoughts” on this and how your own stories aim to highlight such important themes as connectivity etc.?

One of the very unfortunate legacies of living in such a technologically oriented world is that our minds, neuropathways, cognition and attention spans, have all been deeply affected by the uses of technology. While there have been improvements in productivity and many other benefits, we are not so present to what it has caused us. Accordingly, one of the biggest threats/themes in the Immortal Storyverse (and our “reckoning”) are all heavily influenced by the prevalence of technology in our lives. Unfortunately, the overreliance on technology and its atrophying effects on us is also quite real.

I love this idea of tapping into the Wuxia genre and storytelling to build a cohesive universe. The MCU has, for the most part, remained unprecedented in how far it has taken existing IP and interested to hear how much of an impact you feel this has made, especially tapping into genre filmmaking and minority storytelling such as Black Panther and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

I am a big fan of what Marvel has done and of course, in certain respects, we are standing on their shoulders in doing what we are doing — but where we are quite different is that while we can be wildly be creative and imaginative in our approach, we are also doing so in a way that honours and leans into a deeply authentic cultural, if not metaphysical, understandings that underpin much of classical Eastern wisdom, which is now globally relevant. So, this makes Wuxia much older and different than the Marvel universe. Importantly, while Immortal Studios is a business, we are also a mission-based company, so our aim is not only to be creative, fun and cool, but also transformational. That again, makes us different from what multinational corporations do and think about in terms of content planning.

Immortal MCU. Marvel Studios explores martial arts with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021).

Immortal Studios feels like a wonderful mix of traditional storytelling and embracing new technology across various platforms. How have you so far balanced the writing and artwork alongside the impact of AI, without taking anything away from the creatives involved in your projects?

All of our core work, properties, and creations from writing to drawing, have come directly from human heads, hearts and hands, so there is nothing “artificial” about our work. Now on that foundation of key human creations, there now exists the opportunity to iterate, test, and even possibly co-create with technology, which is something that we are experimenting with. It is all happening in real time right now, and we are very committed to building a human-centred approach.

Transmedia opens up so many possibilities to maximise on IP and storytelling. You have martial arts, dance, comic books, relevant reviews, and the potential for movies — How have you gone about managing all of the different arms?

We have made an initial focus on the intersection of comics, games, and movies — all supported by video forms of different lengths and types. That is already quite a large sandbox there. We have intentionally built an infrastructure that actually invites and rewards collaboration across media at the development and planning stages, so I like to think that we are transmedia native.

Immortal wisdom. Payhuan chats with Shaolin Abbot, the leader of the Shaolin Temple.

It’s incredible to see all the connective tissue — not only with veterans of Marvel, Riot Games, DC, and 20th Century Fox — but also key partnerships with the Shaolin Temple and UCLA. I’d love to hear more about how these institutions became involved.

Well, many of the key companies are not partners per se, but we have successfully recruited our founding team atop those world-class pop culture organizations because those leaders recognized, pretty quickly, the astuteness of our strategies, ideas and purpose. I have been a close advisor to the Shaolin Temple — and also went to UCLA — so those were no-brainers when it came time to build.

There is an incredible backbone of mythology that the Wuxia tales instil, and Immortal Studios often highlights how much “honour and meaning is missing from much of our popular entertainment today.” Could you explain more on what you mean here and how the chivalry of martial arts may help fix this.

Frankly, the starting point for many stories these days exists to make money, and when that is the starting point and has no other expressed value, one can see how easily that can lead to the delivery of “commercial” content that is there to help kill time. Frankly, that has also happened to the Wuxia genre when it simply became about the fighting, violence, or great stunts. So as someone who has been given the keys to the inner sanctum of Wuxia, I wanted to return it to its founding ideals.

Immortal movies. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is one of many incredible Wuxia movies. Check out other Immortal Studios' favourites here.

Obviously, martial arts has been hugely popular in the movie industry over the years and has certainly had a huge impact on Hollywood, whether it’s Bruce Lee or the Hong Kong action movies of the ‘90s. You mention on your site that Wuxia literature has been poorly served by cinematic adaptation. Why do you think this?

Adaptation is always hard so let’s start there. I would also differentiate between martial arts, kung fu, and Wuxia. Wuxia is more akin to hip hop vs. rapping. With this in mind, there are many other elements of philosophy, aesthetics, poetry, romance, spirituality, and morality, all of which are inextricable parts of the genre. Many of those elements have not been honoured or embraced by accidental tourists into the genre.

What do you feel the Wuxia movies tapped into during the noughties in terms of how well they crossed over from East to West and their huge impact on World cinema?

At its core, there is something very personally empowering about Wuxia and taps into our secret wish fulfilment, which makes it very attractive to just about everyone. And when you add the authentic path and practices of Kung Fu in all its forms both inner and outer — which has consistently made superhumans for real — the dynamism is kinetic and profound. That is the enduring attractiveness of the genre.

Immortal story. THE ADEPT tells the story of a young woman who begins a journey to become  the adept to an ancient martial tradition which has been lost to the ages.

Superhero movies have become a beast, and I’m curious to hear more about how you feel Wuxia is able to refocus storytelling.

Stan Lee was a good friend, and we had a lot of time to talk ad nauseam about the similarities and differences. While I have enjoyed superhero stories, for the most part, they have not really shown me a path forward with my own life and choices. Radioactive spiders, alien technologies, and cosmic accidents tend to be how people become powerful in the superhero world. That is not the case for our martial heroes — who generally tend to be the least powerful and privileged among us. So, Wuxia really is a genre of the people with deep transformational technologies embedded, if you will.

Where are you currently at in attempting to bring the IP to the big and small screens?

We are actively developing all the core Immortal foundational titles as motion picture franchises right now, along with a handful of games including VR games, and a Table Top Role-playing game. We are also planning a variety of video offerings for small to medium-sized screens. That is a pretty good chunk right now. In today’s ever-expanding media landscape, just having those stories in the mix means that we will be primed for all media platforms.

It all sounds fantastic, Payhuan, I wish you all the best with each and every Immortal project — it’s an epic venture so far!

Thank you for taking the time and the interest, Rich. I have enjoyed your questions and appreciate your sincere and thoughtful comments and questions!

Visit www.Immortal-Studios.com for more information. In the meantime, Immortal Studios Presents ”The Hero Re-Awakens” at NeueHouse Hollywood in Celebration of AAPI Heritage and Mental Health Awareness Month.

On Thursday, May 8 from 7:00–9:00 PM at NeueHouse Hollywood, Immortal will host ”The Hero Re-Awakens” — a live multimedia celebration of Wuxia, the iconic Chinese martial arts fantasy genre centred on justice, transformation, and inner power. The event honours both AAPI Heritage Month and Mental Health Awareness Month and spotlights Immortal’s five-year journey from indie comics to a cinematic universe.

Presented in partnership with NeueHouse, Asian Hustle Network, and Kung Fu Magazine, the evening will feature top creators, performers, and thought leaders celebrating Immortal’s mission — and its growing role as a cultural and commercial force.

Event Highlights Include:

• Fireside Chat: Immortal VP of Content Kelly Sue Milano and renowned Kung Fu/pop culture journalist Gene Ching in conversation with Immortal Founder & CEO to discuss Wuxia’s global rise, Immortal’s mission and cross-cultural impact, and the company’s evolution from comics to a multimedia entertainment studio.

• Storyverse Showcase: A cinematic reel unveiling the evolving Immortal IP universe, including Fa Sheng: Origins and Chronicles of the Immortal Swordsmen

• Live Performances: Lion dancing and martial arts by East Wind Foundation

• Immortal Experience Zone: Step & repeat, exclusive merch tables, collectables, and exhibits from the Immortal collection

Wuxia: The Genre of Now

With traditional superhero franchises losing cultural momentum, Wuxia — long a cornerstone of Eastern storytelling—is now emerging as the next global super-genre. Rooted in personal mastery, purpose, and justice, Wuxia offers a refreshing antidote to nihilism and disconnection. At a time when cultural forms are often borrowed without full understanding, Immortal is bringing deep cultural authenticity to the forefront — honouring the origins of Wuxia while evolving it for today’s world.

Immortal Studios is leading this resurgence, developing an interconnected, cross-platform Wuxia Storyverse rooted in the legendary works of Shiao Yi, one of the most influential modern masters of the genre.