Among the female Mando-pop stars, there's a fairly clear division between the girls and the women, and it's not simply an issue of age.
In the girl camp, Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) epitomizes the lasting appeal of the girl next door, with the barely concealed, budding sexuality that she flaunted at a concert last weekend in Taipei.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SILVER FISH
Meanwhile, on the women's side, Faye Wong (王菲) reigns supreme for her grace and captivating unattainability, a type of regal aloofness nurtured over 15 years as a vaguely mysterious superstar whose audiences with the public are carefully staggered and always preceded by much fanfare and excitement. Her concert tomorrow at Taipei's Municipal Stadium is no exception.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SILVER FISH
As of press time, the only tickets remaining are for the "rock and roll" section of the stadium, which is the standing area on the field starting from about 50m from the stage. These are going for NT$1,500 a piece, but before anyone chokes on their tea, those are the medium-priced tickets. All the prime tickets in the NT$3,000 to NT$2,500 range were sold out weeks ago, along with the NT$800 and NT$1,000 tickets. The sales so far ensure a crowd of about 40,000.
Wong generates such massive following by being, first and foremost, one of the most gifted singers in Mando-pop, a talent handed down, she says, by her mother who was a revolutionary opera singer in China. It no doubt also helped that she inherited a 175cm frame and a model's good looks.
Her first album was her self-titled debut when she performed under the name Shirley Wong, released in 1989, less than two years after migrating from her native Beijing to Hong Kong's greener pastures. Since then, she's transformed herself multiple times, first ditching her original stage name in favor of her current one after taking a break in the US between 1991 and 1992, and later taking the path of most Hong Kong pop stars to experiment with movie roles, notably in Wang Kar Wai's (王家衛) Chunking Express (重慶森林) and most recently 2046.
Wong also had a brief fascination for the ethereal music of the Cocteau Twins in the mid-1990s, which manifested itself in three covers of the Scottish band's songs on Wondering Music (胡思亂想, 1994) and collaborations with the band on Impatience (浮躁, 1996), and Faye Wong (快樂不快樂, 1997). The collaborations seemed tailor-made, as Wong shares the same distant-sounding, high-pitched siren voice of the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, and the gauzy aesthetic of the Twins' album covers even made its way onto Wong's album cover art.
The overwhelming Cocteau Twins influence began to wane, though, with the release of Sing and Play (唱游, 1998) and Only Love Strangers (只愛陌生人, 1999), when Wong set off in a more blatantly pop direction. She still retained some of the edge that continued her flirtation with anti-pop status, but the sound became more accessible, and, dare one say it, KTV-friendly. Her most recent album, To Love (將愛, 2003), is a mosh of her two recent artistic tendencies: saccharine pop and daring avant-garde.
By juggling these two styles, Wong's status has only risen over the years. So much so that, even without releasing any new material, she can drop into town and pack a stadium, as she's sure to do tomorrow.
Performance notes:
What: No Faye, No Live
When: Tomorrow, 7pm
Where: Taipei Municipal Stadium, 46 Bade Rd, Sec 1, Taipei (
Tickets: Available at door or through Era ticketing at www.ticket.com.tw. Only tickets for NT$1,500 remain.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS