Wei Hua

(Wayhwa)

Pop singer

Wei Hua was one of few female rock/pop stars of the 1990s. She had worked as an English-language newscaster at CCTV (Chinese Central Television) from 1987 to 1989. She resigned from CCTV because the Chinese government did not allowed her to appear on television after the 1989 student movements. She reinvented herself as a rock singer just at the time when rock music became popular in the early 1990s. She changed her appearance after becoming a rock star: She stopped wearing business power suits, and dyed her black hair with other colours—first purple and blue, then blonde.

Her music takes a strong position on the conventional rock themes of freedom, self and truth. She began to record music in 1990.

In March 1993, she wrote the song ‘Fresh’ (Xian) to remind her audience of the unstoppable growth of life in the spring. Her most famous album is Modernization (Xiandaihua, 1995). Such songs as ‘Forbidden City’ (Lao gugong), ‘Gossip’ (Xianhua) and ‘Modernization’ (Xiandaihua) reveal the tension of a cultural identity caught between tradition and modernity, past and future, the inner world of the self and the external world of the other. Other songs show a close connection between self-expression and consumption. ‘Sunday’ (Xingqitian) links leisure to such places as Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The English song ‘Visa’ describes a trip overseas: ‘walk the streets of Rome and LA.’ and ‘buy a few things: coffee, cheese, books, clothes, perfume’.

Further reading

Baranovitch, Nimrod (2003). China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997. Berkeley: University of California Press, 176–86.

REN HAI