After endless songs about unrequited love, pop songstress Wan Fang (萬芳) reemerges to spread her new gospel of love, acceptance and spiritual equilibrium.
The Mandopop singer will perform in a concert titled Wan Fang 2012 Live Concert Love, After All (萬芳 2012 Live Concert 原來我們都是愛著的) at Legacy Taipei (傳音樂展演空間) on Wednesday to support her latest release. She will then tour China throughout September.
Wan is mostly known for her hit song New Endless Love (新不了情), which was released in 1993, but continues to reign as the most popular KTV song in Taiwan. Her latest effort, Love, After All (原來我們都是愛著的), expands on the theme of happiness, which she first explored on her 2010 pop-gospel album Let’s Not Grieve Anymore (我們不傷心了).
Photo Courtesy of Rock Records
“Life is a river,” Wan told the Taipei Times. “This album is about what we encounter in life — the reminiscence, the departure of people, the love and the fear.”
The title track Love, After All boasts lyrics penned by Wan as an homage to her father, who is still alive. The poignant song features Wan’s vocals against a sparse acoustic guitar. Another track, Alzheimer (Silence by the Sea) (阿茲海默), contemplates the meaning of memories and forgetting. Wan’s emotionally drenched vocal hovers above a backdrop of piano and violin.
Wan also bravely goes against the commercial market formula by including only one song about romance, which is Forever (永遠).
Wan’s musical evolution was brought about by her foray into acting and the world music festival circuit since 2002. She has starred in 11 TV dramas, for which she has won two Golden Bell Awards. She is also a veteran theater actress whose latest stage outing was the acclaimed Taipei Dad, New York Mom (台北爸爸，紐約媽媽) in February this year.
“Acting opens up possibilities for music. You enter into a character and the story in a song,” she said.
Formerly a chanteuse known for commercial ballads about unrequited love, Wan’s musical turning point came about when she plunged into the terrain of personal anguish, vulnerability and self-discovery in the acclaimed one-woman musical drama Wan Fang’s Solo in My Room (萬芳的房間劇場) in 2007.
“I turned down many opportunities to record albums of commercial love songs,” she said. “I wanted my music to reflect life as I experienced it — love, grief, acceptance and all.”
When asked about romance, Wan was circumspect.
“I don’t dwell on romance. There are many things in life. I’m more curious about what happens after it [life] ends.”
Despite the new album’s metaphysical slant, Wan said she will treat her fans to a lushly produced concert. “There will be a live band, projected images, videos, and lighting design,” she said. “I want my fans to be submerged into a total experience of music, stories, images and light.
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
It seems every few days one bumps into one of those “real man” comments in which Taiwan is urged to “face reality” or similar, and “make a deal,” with the speaker implying that soon it will be too late. “Deal” advocates always present themselves as having a superior grip on reality, and the manly ability to make the “hard choice.” Their testosterone-laden language often echoes that of Taiwan sellout advocates. Note that such commentary always specifies a process (“make a deal, work with, make progress”), never the end state of what occupation by a violent authoritarian colonialist state will entail. In
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
As someone who normally steers clear of books with “transcendence” or “metaphysics” in their subtitles, this reviewer — a casual observer of local belief systems since the 1990s — found Fabian Graham’s Money God Temples in Taiwan a challenging read. Those who’ve only dipped their toes into temple culture will likely need to parse several sections with special care if they’re to keep up with the author, a British ethnographic researcher whose previous books have investigated religious practices among ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. This scholarly volume examines a facet of Taiwan’s religious landscape that didn’t exist a century ago, and
RSS