Faye Wong

Faye Wong: The Diva Who Refused to Perform

In 2004, accepting Best Female Artist at the Golden Melody Awards, she said this: "I can sing songs. This I know. Now that Golden Melody judges have given me their approval, I approve of their approval." Five years earlier, asked by reporters about her divorce, she had replied: "What does it have to do with you? Nothing to do with your readers either." Faye Wong has sold nearly ten million albums, held a Guinness World Record, appeared on the cover of *Time*, and had one of her songs carried into lunar orbit by a Chinese spacecraft. She has also spent thirty years making it very clear that she does not care whether you like her.

Beijing

She was born on 8 August 1969 at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing. Her father, Wang Youlin, was a mining engineer; her mother, Xia Guiying, was a soprano who sang revolutionary music. She had an older brother, Wang Yi, who died in his fifties. She grew up in the Qingniangou area near Andingmen, attended Ditan Primary School and Beijing Dongzhimen Middle School, and in 1987 was admitted to study biology at Xiamen University. She declined.

While still in high school she recorded six cheap cassette albums of cover versions, most of them Teresa Teng songs — a detail that turns almost comic later, when a Chinese state poll would rank her the second-most influential Chinese celebrity of the previous sixty years, behind only Teng herself.

Hong Kong, and the Culture Shock

At eighteen she moved to Hong Kong to join her father, intending only to satisfy a residency requirement before going to study in Australia. She could not speak Cantonese. The loneliness was severe enough that she began taking singing lessons with an instructor named Tai See-chung mainly as a distraction. It became a career.

She signed with Cinepoly in 1988. Her debut, *Shirley Wong* (1989), sold 25,000 copies and won bronze at the Chik Chak New Artist Award — respectable, forgettable. The turn came in 1992 with *Coming Home*, built around "Fragile Woman," a cover of a Miyuki Nakajima composition. It made her a star, and she used the leverage immediately: she dropped the anglicised stage name and became Faye Wong, 王菲.

The Experiment

What followed is one of the strangest runs in the history of popular Asian music, because it consists largely of a mainstream superstar making deliberately difficult records. *No Regrets* (1993) established her as a lyricist; *100,000 Whys* (1993) introduced alternative influences; *Random Thoughts* (1994) is audibly indebted to the Cocteau Twins, and by 1996 she was collaborating with the Scottish band directly on her album *Fuzao* (*Restless*), still regarded as her artistic peak. *Mystery* and *Sky*, both 1994, broke her into the Mandarin market.

In 1997 EMI paid HK$60 million for 55 songs across five albums, and she kept experimenting: *Sing and Play* (1998) carried her own compositions, *Lovers & Strangers* (1999) sold over 800,000 copies, and *Fable* (2000) was structured as a song cycle. *To Love* (2003) turned inward. By the late 1990s she was recording chiefly in Mandarin, her native language, and dominating the mainland market she had left as a teenager.

In March 2000 Guinness World Records certified her as the best-selling Cantopop female artist, at roughly 9.7 million albums. In March 1999 she became the first Chinese singer to perform at the Nippon Budokan. Her 1999 video game theme "Eyes on Me" sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide and won Song of the Year at the Japan Gold Disc Awards. In 1996 she appeared on the cover of *Time*, only the second Chinese artist after Gong Li. In 2007 her "Wishing We Last Forever" was played by China's Chang'e 1 lunar spacecraft.

The Films

Wong Kar-wai cast her in *Chungking Express* (1994), a performance that won her Best Actress at the 1996 Stockholm International Film Festival and made her a figure in world cinema. She returned for *2046*, shot intermittently between 1999 and 2004, and earned a Best Actress nomination at the 22nd Hong Kong Film Awards for *Chinese Odyssey 2002*. The director's assessment is the most precise thing anyone has said about her: "She's the most unique actress I've ever worked with, because she doesn't try hard to act and she doesn't need to — she's incredibly gifted."

Marriages, Retirement, Return

She married the Beijing rock musician Dou Wei in June 1996; their daughter Leah Dou was born on 3 January 1997, and they divorced in 1999 after his affair with the photographer Gao Yuan. She married the actor Li Yapeng in July 2005; their daughter Li Yan was born in 2006 with a cleft lip, and the couple founded the Smile Angel Foundation to support affected children. They divorced in 2013. Since 2014 she has been with the Hong Kong actor Nicholas Tse, a relationship that had first run from 2000 to 2003.

She withdrew from the industry after her 2005 marriage, having said in January of that year: "If I ever retire from showbiz, I hope you all forget about me." The comeback began at the 2010 CCTV New Year's Gala with "Legend," followed by a tour across Asia from 2010 to 2012. On 30 December 2016 she staged "Faye's Moments Live" at Shanghai's Mercedes-Benz Arena, free-streamed to 20 million viewers, controversial for its ticket prices and its distribution, and divisive on the merits — several critics said she sang flat.

Why Faye Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a real and specific artistic quality: Wong repeatedly used commercial power to fund music the market had not asked for, and made the market follow her. Taking the sound of the Cocteau Twins — reverb-drowned, wordless, post-punk — and grafting it onto Cantopop in 1994 was not a fashionable move; it was close to commercial suicide, and she did it while she was the biggest star in the region, then collaborated with the band directly. Her instrument is genuinely unusual, a soprano capable of the glossolalic, floating delivery that Western alternative music had developed and Chinese pop had no vocabulary for. Wong Kar-wai's observation that she "doesn't try hard to act and she doesn't need to" identifies the same trait in another medium: an absence of effort that is either laziness or complete instinctive control, and in her case is demonstrably the second.

The honest counter-case is that she is not primarily a composer. Much of her defining material was written by others, including her breakthrough hit, and her originality lies in curation, interpretation and nerve rather than in creating a new musical language from nothing. Her later output has been sporadic, mostly film themes; the 2016 Shanghai concert drew genuine criticism for pitch problems. And her cultivated remoteness — the terse press answers, the "I approve of their approval" — has always shaded between artistic integrity and simple unwillingness to engage. What is not in doubt is the influence. Her position in the Sinophone world has been compared to Madonna's in America, and unlike most such comparisons it survives inspection.

Legacy

Wong has been a Buddhist since the early 1990s, released *Loving Kindness & Wisdom* in 2001 in support of a Maitreya Buddha statue project, and donated substantial sums to it — a religiosity that has periodically brought her trouble with Chinese authorities. PETA named her Asia's sexiest vegetarian woman in 2008 and 2011; RHA media listed her among the ten most admired female singers in Asia in 2014. In a 2009 State Council Information Office poll drawing seven million votes, she was ranked the second-most influential Chinese celebrity of the preceding sixty years. She has been described as "singer, actress, mother, celebrity, royalty, sex symbol and diva all at the same time," which is accurate and also misses the point. The thing that made her singular was never the diva. It was the refusal.