Tai Chi Celebrities: Which Public Figures Actually Practice It

Which U.S. Political Party Leaders Practice Tai Chi?

We have not found reliable public documentation of a sitting U.S. political party leader practicing Tai Chi.

The closest documented example is Michelle Obama. During her 2014 visit to Chengdu, China, the then First Lady joined a Tai Chi class at Chengdu No. 7 High School. Her own White House travel journal records the visit, and official photographs show her practicing with students. However, this was participation in a single class, not evidence of a regular practice — and she was not a political party leader.

One other name circulates. A 2004 Los Angeles Times feature on David Carradine notes in passing that Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of the then-presidential candidate, “publicly touts the benefits of tai chi.” That is advocacy, not documented practice, and we have found no source showing she trains.

While no direct match has emerged from the public records we reviewed, several American musicians, actors, and other public figures do have documented connections to Tai Chi. Their experiences offer a different perspective on how the practice reached beyond traditional martial arts communities — and, in the case of the musicians below, a shared lineage that is more interesting than any celebrity list.

The six, and how well each is documented

Read the last column as the ranking. Lou Reed is first because he wrote it down himself; Peter Kwong is the most concrete teaching record because his students wrote it, not his press.

American Musicians: The Teachers Behind Their Tai Chi

The most substantial American Tai Chi story in the public record is not about celebrities at all. It is about a Chen-style teacher in New York, Ren Guang Yi, and the musicians who gravitated to him.

Lou Reed: Twenty-Five Years of Chen Style

Lou Reed’s practice is the best documented of any Western public figure, largely because he wrote it down. The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi (HarperOne, 2023) collects his own notes on practice, with chapters on Chen Village and on Ren Guang Yi, edited after his death by Laurie Anderson and others.

In his own words, quoted in the book:

“People think I lift weights, but I don’t. It’s purely from doing Chen Tai Chi with Ren GuangYi. I do two hours a day every day. Big time. I’ve been doing it for twenty-five years, so I’m not new to it. If I miss a practice, my body starts to hurt.”

That “twenty-five years” counts practice, not years under one teacher. Asked in 2007 how it began, Reed told LA Yoga: “In the early ’80s. I was studying a hard style martial art and I was taken aside and told that I would really enjoy this… And it started from there.” The same interview, published that June, describes him as having spent “the past twenty years” in the breath arts and as studying with Master Ren Guang Yi — so the first few years were spent elsewhere before Ren. The twenty-five in the book, written near the end of his life, extends that same count by another decade and a half.

Read together, the two accounts are consistent: roughly a quarter century of daily practice, most of it under Ren, beginning with a referral out of a hard-style school. Ren appears in the book as a chapter of his own, and accompanied Reed on stage at concert performances.

A quarter century of daily practice, under a named teacher, with the practitioner’s own written record — that is the standard against which the rest of this article should be read.

Tony Visconti: Yang First, Then Chen

Tony Visconti — the producer behind David Bowie’s Heroes, T. Rex’s Electric Warrior — arrived at Chen style by a longer route, and his account is unusually specific.

He had already trained in Yun Mu Kwan karate and Wing Chun before finding Tai Chi. In a 2019 interview with Copper magazine, he described the sequence:

“I found a great teacher, John Kells, who studied the Yang style in London and Taiwan… I studied with Master Kells for 5 years in the art of being soft, absorbing energy of an opponent, and deflecting their energy. I thought this was everything about Taiji.”

It was not. Back in New York, unable to find a Yang teacher he rated, he asked Bowie for advice. Bowie told him to call Lou Reed.

“I phoned Lou and he told me about Master Ren Guang-yi and that he was studying the Chen style of Taiji… I’ll never forget Lou’s words about Master Ren, ‘He’s the real deal!’ I spent about 12 years with the (now) Grandmaster Ren.”

So the article’s central fact is not that two musicians practiced Tai Chi. It is that Visconti and Reed were classmates under the same Chen teacher for over a decade, having arrived from different directions — Visconti via Yang style in London, Reed via his own early training.

What Visconti says he got from it is worth quoting, because it is not about health:

“Both Lou Reed and I worked in a world full of egotistical artists’ aggressive business traps. The Taiji way of thinking, the balance of Yin and Yang, the power of softness over hardness has helped us enormously for peaceful results when conflict is in our way.”

Iggy Pop: Qigong, Not the Full Form

Iggy Pop’s case is real but different in kind, and the distinction matters.

Asked about his fitness regimen by Rolling Stone Australia in 2017, he answered:

“The root of it is a series of exercises called qigong, which form the basis of tai chi. I learned it from a Korean tai chi master named Don Ahn, who had a place in Soho. You don’t need a funny suit. You don’t need to go to a gym. You don’t build no muscle. It just gives you a good energy, good flexibility and good circulation.”

He describes qigong as the foundation of Tai Chi, learned from a Tai Chi teacher — not a decades-long form practice. A decade earlier, in a 2007 Rolling Stone interview, he had credited “Aleve and tai chi” with helping him recover from accumulated injuries.

Both statements are his own. Neither supports calling him a long-term Tai Chi form practitioner, and this article does not.

Ozzy Osbourne: A Recent Start

Osbourne’s connection is the thinnest of the musicians here, and worth stating plainly. In a 2023 episode of the family podcast The Osbournes, he said he intended to try Tai Chi because of its effect on balance: “I’m going to try to; it’s good for balance.” Later episodes describe him having taken a couple of classes.

That is a stated intention followed by a beginning — nothing more. It is not comparable to Reed’s twenty-five years, and anyone citing it as evidence of established practice is overstating the source.

Actors Who Practiced and Taught

Two actors in the public record did more than take a class.

David Carradine

Carradine learned martial arts for the Kung Fu television series and never stopped. A 2004 Los Angeles Times profile by Jeannine Stein put it directly:

“the 67-year-old actor has continued to practice and teach kung fu and tai chi since studying it for the show, staying very much connected to these Eastern disciplines.”

The same piece notes his “multipart series of his instructional tai chi and kung fu videos,” and a training partnership with kung fu master Rob Moses spanning some twenty years. Asked why he had stayed with it for three decades, he gave a three-word answer — “It feels good” — before elaborating:

“Tai chi, kung fu, I don’t care if you do them all day long for the rest of your life, there will always be something further, something more.”

Carradine was clear that he was not a formal master — “I’m not trying to be a master, I’m just trying to find more of me.” This article does not attach him to a lineage he did not claim.

Peter Kwong

Peter Kwong, known as Rain in Big Trouble in Little China, is the clearest case of an actor who teaches. A 2020 profile records more than forty-seven years of martial arts practice, with a path through Hung Kuen, Yau Kung Mon and Northern Shaolin before Tai Chi Chuan and chi kung meditation. Before the pandemic he taught at the Throop Unitarian Universalist Church and in Singer Park in Pasadena; his courses covered the Yang style long form — 108 movements.

A 2025 piece from Pasadena Village, written by people who attended his classes, fills in the rest: the Senior Tai Chi Class has run since 2002, and Kwong led it until shortly before his death, calling out the 108 forms for a group of older students in a park.

That is the most concrete teaching record in this article, and it came from his students rather than his press.

Claims That Do Not Hold Up

Three widely repeated claims about political figures did not survive checking, and are worth stating so they stop circulating.

Jimmy Carter. Lists of Tai Chi celebrities routinely include him. The closest source is a 2018 Washington Post profile of the Carters, which describes Rosalynn Carter practicing Tai Chi and meditation each morning — while Jimmy Carter wrote in his study or swam. The practice was his wife’s. Jimmy Carter does not appear to have been a Tai Chi practitioner, and the quote sometimes attributed to him (“Carter swore by gentle motion over strain”) does not exist in any source we could find.

Justin Trudeau. Claims that he has participated in Tai Chi exchanges do not hold. What is documented is a yoga practice, including the peacock pose, which he has discussed publicly. Yoga is not Tai Chi, and the inference from one to the other is not one this site will make.

Mel Gibson. In a 2025 appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Gibson described learning a movement practice combining breath, visualization and release. Asked whether it was Tai Chi, he said: “It was like that. I was doing stuff like that.” That is a related experience described in passing, not a claim of Tai Chi practice — and he did not present it as one.

What This Actually Shows

Strip out the fabricated anecdotes and a different picture emerges from the one most celebrity lists paint.

Tai Chi reached Western public figures not through glamour but through teachers. Ren Guang Yi in New York produced two serious students in Reed and Visconti, who each put in more than a decade. Peter Kwong taught a park class in Pasadena for two decades. David Carradine made instructional videos and kept training with a partner for twenty years. None of this is about red carpets.

The people who stayed with it describe the same thing. Visconti talks about handling conflict. Reed talks about his body hurting when he misses practice. Carradine says there is always something further. None of them talk about it as relaxation.

And the political question, honestly answered, remains: we found no sitting U.S. party leader with a documented practice. If that changes, this page will say so.

A Note on Sourcing

Every claim above traces to a named source: a book the practitioner wrote, an interview they gave, or a periodical that spoke to them directly. Where the evidence supports only part of a familiar claim — Iggy Pop’s qigong, Ozzy Osbourne’s recent start, Michelle Obama’s single class — the article says which part.

We have removed several anecdotes that appeared in earlier versions of this page, including invented scenes and quotes attributed to people who never said them. If you find a claim here that you cannot trace, tell us.

For the mechanics behind what these practitioners train, see Chen style and internal martial arts. For the practice itself, how to do Tai Chi correctly.