(Flaunt) Assuming you’re not already one of his 15.9 million Instagram followers, you might reasonably ask: Who is Jackson Wang? The answer depends in part upon geography.
If you’re in Seoul, Wang is famous for being one seventh of Got7, the boy band launched in 2014 by one of the big three K-pop conglomerates, JYP Entertainment Corporation. He made his formal “debut” (this word takes on a special, star-making quality when used within the context of K-pop fandom) after two and a half years of intensive training, a remarkable feat in itself in an industrial system where would-be stars are often recruited from middle or high school, and rigorously trained to sing and dance for up to ten years before either debuting or failing out. K-pop groups are as rigidly structured as a professional sports team, and Wang’s role is clearly defined: he is Got7’s “main rapper,” a term referring to the band member who gets the rap parts in each song.
In China, Wang’s known by his given name, Wang Jia Er. Though his early base of Chinese fans still came from K-pop—the genre has made inroads in China at least since pioneering Korean act H.O.T performed in front of 13,000 screaming fans in February 2000—Wang has proven his mettle as a competent and entertaining variety show personality in China, causing his star to rise higher than most K-pop idols in the country. He first broke out on Go Fridge, a cooking show co-presented by Wang and seasoned TV host He Jiong. The show racked up a staggering 400 million views in its initial ten-episode run, cementing Wang’s status as a small-screen celebrity and opening the door for him to appear on a subsequent string of popular Chinese variety shows. These include 2018’s Idol Producer, on which he acts as a “hip hop mentor” along with Asian-American rap icon MC Jin, and Hot Blood Dance Crew, where he showcases his prodigious dance skills.
For an American audience, however, Wang is attempting to forge a new identity. In doing so, the Hong Kong, China-born wunderkind is struggling to shed the K-pop and variety show tags that he’s inextricably tied up with among his fans in Asia, and to establish himself as more than just one face in a group.
Despite fitting the mold physically, Jackson Wang isn’t exactly a cookie cutter K-pop idol. He comes from a family of elite athletes. His father, Wang Ruiji, was an Olympic fencer, and his mother, Sophia Chow, an Olympic gymnast. Both competed at the LA Summer Games in 1984. Wang’s older brother played professional rugby in Australia. Though originally from mainland China, Wang’s parents moved to Hong Kong, China shortly before he was born, where his father coached the Hong Kong fencing team and, eventually, Wang himself, who took up the sport at age 10.
He showed so much promise as a saber fencer that he was offered a scholarship to join Stanford’s team. Around the same time, he was noticed by a talent scout, and after passing an initial audition, he was offered the opportunity to train in the center of the K-pop idol-making industry. It was a hell of a decision to make at such a young age, but 17-year-old Wang chose Seoul over Stanford, entertainment over sports.
His athleticism set him apart from the beginning. After debuting with Got7, Wang did the rounds on a series of variety shows in both China and Korea, shows that often stage physical challenges as part of the proceedings. Wang’s strength and athletic background made him a clear fan and commentator favorite in these contests. He tells Flaunt that he has applied the same rigorous training methodology to his idol career as he did to fencing in his youth: “the will and dedication to one specific thing, one specific goal, my dream—it’s just going full out,” he says.
His work ethic shows in other areas as well. Wang’s native tongue is Cantonese, and he grew up around the local dialect of his mother’s native Shanghai. Upon entering the K-pop machine, he had to pick up Korean as a trade language. In building up his mainland Chinese following, he’s shown remarkable improvement in his Mandarin language ability between the 2015 premiere of Go Fridge—when his broken Mandarin was the butt of more than a few jokes on social media—to now, when he’s functionally fluent. He has proven skilled at adapting quickly and adjusting smoothly to new professional contexts, combining localized vocabulary with a natural stage and screen charisma—a combination he’ll need to double down on to achieve his next task: finding a U.S. audience.
Jackson Wang’s U.S. campaign is off to a solid start. Over the last two years he’s dropped collaborations with Gucci Mane and DC producer, GoldLink, and turned some ears with his 2017 single, “Papillon.” In October, he put out his solo debut, MIRRORS, an eight-track album fusing rap, trap, R’n’B and balladry. For a relatively unknown (in the West) artist, MIRRORS did well: it hit #32 on the Billboard 200 on the week of its release, becoming the highest-ever charting debut from a Chinese artist. On the back of that success, Wang chopped it up with James Corden in November, participating in a bit of language and culinary exchange, picking up some Cockney slang in the process.
But he’s not satisfied. “It could have done better,” Wang tells Flaunt about the reception of MIRRORS, on which he sings and raps almost entirely in English. On one hand, Wang might be comparing his own performance against BTS, the Korean boy band that last year cemented K-pop as a bona fide overseas export by charting three number one albums on the Billboard 200 within a 12-month period. (Nobody had done that since The Beatles and The Monkees half a century earlier.)
On the other hand, Wang is very conscious about breaking away from K-pop in his solo career. When I interview him this past December at Shanghai’s historical Peace Hotel, he is very careful to point out that we are talking about his solo act: half his year, and half his career, is dedicated to Got7, and he’s left to pursue a solo career on his own time. “It’s six months in Korea, six months in China or America; six months group, six months solo,” he explains, adding, “It’s tough, the limited time. I have to make the best use of my time every single year to produce two years of content.”
Seen in this light, the slick production that pops off MIRRORS in every direction begins to take on a more nuanced tone. The album, a fledgling mission statement of sorts, is, in Wang’s telling, all about pain. “It’s all based off of my experiences, and the stories that I hear from seniors in the industry.” Of the album’s lead single, “Bullet To the Heart,” Wang notes, “It’s saying that life is just gonna keep torturing us like a demon. There are gonna be bad days and hard times, but then, what’s more important is the ambition and the dedication and the love that you have towards your goals or your dream. That will always overcome everything, that’s the strongest power that I believe in.”
On another MIRRORS track, “BAD BACK,” Wang raps with trap-ballad bravado: “New whip, and know that thing exotic / Top speed, we flyin’ like a rocket.” But take a look at the front flip Wang executes in the video for album standout, “TITANIC,” and it’s not hard to imagine that “BAD BACK” might also refer to premature lumbar problems for a performer who has pushed his physicality so hard for so long, even for a 25-year-old.
Though he probably needs it, Wang doesn’t rest much even when he’s not grinding out his solo act or his band. In theory, he should have his choice of major labels to work with in creating a Western brand identity. But Wang is intent on maintaining complete creative control over his music and his image, so he spends all of his free time—and often late-night Skype meetings across international time zones—as the chief of Team Wang, his boutique label.
“I want this company to express the vision that I have in my mind,” he tells Flaunt, reiterating the themes he says are also baked in to MIRRORS: pain, obstacles, ambition, goals, success. “That’s why I can’t let other people in on the creative, or on the content, or on the branding strategy. I can’t let anybody touch it because it belongs to me. It represents me.”
MIRRORS forms part of a larger anthology of Wang’s solo material from the last two years entitled Journey to the West, a name taken from a 16th century Chinese tale that remains a pop cultural touchstone today. The original story involves the tribulations of monk Tang Sanzang and the mythical hero Sun Wukong, also known as the Monkey King, who are charged with carrying Buddhist scriptures westward along the Silk Road from the ancient Chinese capital of Chang’an to India.
Wang clearly has further West in mind when he uses the title. “I’m Chinese, Asian, and I’m trying to share my music, share Jackson Wang as an artist [or] character, to the American audience,” he tells Flaunt. When asked to address this audience directly, he adds: “I’m just this Chinese kid who loves music and tries hard, and is willing to take any risk and to take on any challenges placed upon me.”
In plying his trade on U.S. soil, Wang is tapping in to an Asian hip hop tradition first blazed by his Idol Producer co- mentor and close friend, MC Jin, and a zeitgeist currently epitomized by LA-dwelling Indonesian rapper, Rich Brian, who guests on MIRRORS. But Wang may have a harder set of challenges than either of these predecessors in carving out an American fanbase.
For one thing, he must work double time to escape being pigeonholed as a “K-pop artist,” especially in a cultural moment when Americans are finally waking up to the Korean pop-cultural wave on the back of BTS’s breakout success. In a March interview with MTV News, Wang talks about being grateful to the rigors of the K-pop idol-producing industry for making him who he is, singling out its “no mercy every single day” ethos as a positive. That comes with a dark side, though: K-pop’s intense training and promotion regime has been linked to several recent tragedies, casting a long shadow over the industry. In speaking with Flaunt, Wang is reticent to answer questions about his K-pop background, preferring to focus on his solo career, which falls more squarely in the category of rap. But given the extent to which singing, dancing, stage performance, and genre-hopping in pursuit of chart metrics define the K-pop vibe as a whole, it’s difficult to imagine hip hop fans in the genre’s birthplace accepting Jackson Wang as a rapper straight off the bat.
Another challenge will be navigating the complex web of contemporary fame, at a time when it seems as if every cultural capital is dealing with divisions or contested values across media, politics, and the intersection therein of the arts. The microscope atop his every declaration, every move, is constant, and a misstep or polarizing opinion may cause unforeseeable damage. Add this to the to the training regimen, the intensive schedule, the daily scaling of his fan base, and you understand how fragile all of this can actually be.
To conclude, Jackson Wang’s brand demands that he be more relatable and adaptable than most stars in his position, and so he’ll continue to do what he does best: work hard to perfect and refine his trade. As he continues his journey westward, pours more sweat and sleepless nights into Team Wang, and carves out a solo career from the bubble of occasionally fickle K-pop stardom, he faces his biggest obstacle yet: articulating to an American audience in the face of external noise. Perhaps these days you can’t have international stardom without some degree of polarization, especially when you’re part of a movement and shaking the floorboards, or rather the tectonic plates, of a cultural bedrock.
Source: Variety by Josh Feola