About

Tai Chi Keanu is the third installment of sub-memes coming from the immensely popular Sad Keanu meme, making it the fourth exploitable photoshop trend based on the actor. In same vein as Sad Keanu in a helmet and Happy Keanu, Tai Chi Keanu is an exploitable meme coming from paparazzi photographs showing actor Keanu Reeves practising Tai Chi Chuan moves in a parking lot.

Origin

On October the 28th 2010, Paparazzi photos (taken by the Bauer Griffin agency) featuring Keanu Reeves started being hosted on Zimbio.com. Entilted Keanu Reeves Shadowboxes, it's a series of fourteen photos showing Keanu passing by some buildings, parking his car and then going in a shady area to do some shadowboxing exercises.

Knockin' on Live Journal and Reddit's doors

While the photos were immediately featured on many other celebrity gossip websites such as Acidcow, damncoolpics blog, Crack Two or Buzzfeed, they also appeared on OhNoTheyDidn't's LiveJournal the same day they took off, along with their first picture parodies.

The next day, Reddit caught wind of that new trend, in a thread called Now you KNOW Keanu is just fucking with us! by user sadz97.
The parodies started being featured on many other websites, including I Can Has Cheeseburger, 976musique (French Link), or even FacePunch.

A thread on Neogaf forums garnered 7 pages of photoshopped pictures made by users.

• Tumblr related tags
• Tai chi Keanu on a Spanish blog

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