Faye Wong’s (王菲) recent visit to Taipei caused a stir among fans and the entertainment media, but that was to be expected.
The pop diva performed a run of highly anticipated shows at Taipei Arena (台北小巨蛋) last weekend as part of a comeback tour. Wong dropped out of the limelight in 2004, hinting at a retirement from singing.
The announcement of her return to the stage late last year was greeted in Taiwan with frenzied ticket sales: When tickets for last week’s shows went on sale in October, buyers caused ERA’s online ticketing system to crash within minutes. Once ERA fixed the problem, 90 percent of the tickets for her three shows were sold within two hours.
Photo: Taipei Times
While in Taipei last week, the Beijing-born 41-year-old singer’s every move and utterance was closely scrutinized.
Wong is famous for her cool demeanor in public, and TVBS illustrated her reticence by counting the total number of words she spoke to the audience during the three shows: 26.
And as the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) put it, Wong often found herself getting “stuck” (卡卡) wherever she went. Paparazzi and fans mobbed her as soon as she stepped off the plane last week. They mobbed her again at a post-concert party at the Taipei nightspot Barcode (where she had to plead with the photographers to be careful and not push each other), and saw her off at the airport when she left.
But Wong didn’t seem to mind the attention while waiting for her return flight, at least judging from video posted online by the Apple Daily. When asked by reporters to judge her own performances, she replied, “It’s in the past, I don’t care about giving myself a score. Anyhow I did my best.”
She also addressed a minor drama that occurred during her final concert on Sunday. During one segment, Wong sang a number while sitting on a “flying chair” that was lifted three stories high above the audience. The chair got stuck for a few seconds on the way down, which left Wong visibly startled.
“I was a little nervous, but it was OK,” she said. “I thought that the audience was calmer.”
Overnight sensation singer Lin Yu-chun (林育群), also known as “Little Fatty” (小胖), had better look out, because there’s a new YouTube star in town.
Forty-one-year-old comedienne and singer Lotus Wang (王彩樺) has scored more than two million hits for her video and electro-house hit Bobee (保庇, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gWu5Y6yY4E), a cover of a song by South Korean girl band T-ara.
The video recently received a nod from CNN as the “best viral video of the week,” and the “Bobee” dance has become a veritable craze, spawning a rash of copycat videos. The Macarena goes taike (台客), if you will.
Bobee, a catchy tune sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) about asking deities for protection and luck, is on Wang’s first album, Bo Peep Bo Peep (有唱有保庇), which reached the number one spot on G-Music’s charts twice since being released last month.
Wang described herself in a recent interview with the Central News Agency as a mere “B-lister” in the entertainment world.
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
RSS