Hsien-Ching Chen: The Year She Won the Golden Melody Award for Best New Artist, She Was Already in Her Eighth Year of Making Music

30-Second Overview: On June 27, 2026, 27-year-old Hsien-Ching Chen won Best New Artist at the 37th Golden Melody Awards. But she was not new at all: seven years earlier, her breakout song “Gently” had already accumulated more than four million views online, and Gucci’s official Instagram arrived four years before her first album. She started with the microphone at National Chengchi University’s Afro Music club, made music herself in her bedroom, “answered” lines by the poet Hsia Yu through rap, and grew into a singer through StreetVoice and YouTube, all without a record company. So the controversy that night, when people in the audience shouted that they “couldn’t understand her,” was an echo of the same contradiction: what people could not understand was a path they had not yet learned to hear.

Her phone had been taken away.

On June 27, 2026, at the Taipei Arena, when the 37th Golden Melody Awards announced “Hsien-Ching Chen” as the winner of Best New Artist, she walked onto the stage and prepared to take out her phone to read her speech. The draft was on her phone, but under the ceremony rules, staff had already taken it away. So she told the room: “My speech is on my phone, but my phone was confiscated, so now I’m going to... improvise.”¹

In the remarks that followed, she thanked the Golden Melody Awards and all the nominees, saying, “I released two albums last year. Thank you all for being willing to spend time on me. I still have many shortcomings.” She thanked her colleagues at KAO!INC., and especially thanked the label’s founder Dela for inviting her to make the album, saying, “Without him I could not possibly be standing here today.”²

On the night that should have belonged most fully to her, she kept feeling as though she was not really there. In the backstage interview, she described the moment she heard her name called as one in which her “mind went completely blank.” “It felt like I wasn’t here,” she said, adding that when she looked down, she realized “the inside of my clothes was completely soaked.” She described the whole night as “surviving a disaster,” and also as like “being in a sauna,” calling it “my first time experiencing a really intense schedule.”³

A person who had been making music for eight years stood at her own coronation as if she were an outsider who had wandered in. That scene is the miniature of her entire story: the trophy inscribed “Best New Artist” at the Golden Melody Awards was acknowledging someone who was not new at all.

The People Who Blamed Her for Not Going Deep Enough Had Already Been Answered by a Song Title Seven Years Earlier

Start by laying out the timeline.

The album that won Chen the Best New Artist award was her first, released only in March 2025. But her breakout song, “Gently,” had been published online in December 2018. According to Business Weekly, the song “has accumulated more than 4 million views to date.”⁴ Her cover appearance in the inaugural issue of The Perfect Magazine, funded and promoted by Gucci, and her feature on Gucci’s official Instagram, happened in March 2021, a full four years before that first album.⁵

In other words, when the Golden Melody Awards gave her “Best New Artist,” she was 27 and already in her eighth year of making music.

This is the central contradiction around her: what is new is not Chen herself, but the road she took. She never entered a record company’s trainee system. She grew out of university-club cyphers, bedroom recording, and a mind willing to stuff a poet’s lines into rap. The online world recognized her in 2018; the Golden Melody system formally called her name only in 2026. The eight years in between were less a period in which she waited for the system than one in which the system learned how to listen to her.

And the title of her true breakout song had already written this contradiction into itself. In October 2018, the first song she posted on StreetVoice was called “Some People Blame Us for Not Going Deep Enough.” Those ten Chinese characters were borrowed from a poem of the same title by the Taiwanese poet Hsia Yu.⁶ Eight years later, when the Golden Melody audience shouted “can’t understand her” and complained that she was “not deep enough to be easily understood,” that title seemed to have been waiting there all along: some people blame us for not going deep enough. She had said it for everyone seven years earlier.

The Microphone at NCCU Afro Music: Somewhere to Go After Class

Hsien-Ching Chen was born in Taipei in 1998, attended Zhongshan Girls High School, and later entered the Department of Advertising at National Chengchi University.⁷ But her relationship with singing began earlier than any of those credentials.

Her earliest memories were of Taiwanese-language songs. As a child, she lived with her grandparents, whose usual entertainment was singing karaoke at home. The song she most often sang along to was “Double Pillow.” What really connected singing with emotion for her, however, was a few months in kindergarten when she lived alone with her aunt in New York. When her aunt was in a bad mood or under stress, she would sing loudly in her room to vent; one of the lyrics was “my husband doesn’t love me.” That image made Chen realize that singing could be a way to pour out emotion.⁸

She only began listening to large amounts of music in high school, which was also when she started to think making music was “cool.” The turning point came in her senior year: a friend asked her to collaborate on Zhongshan Girls High School’s graduation song. Chen felt that although two people both singing would be youthful, it was “a bit too uninteresting,” so, because she loved Soft Lipa, she decided to write it as rap instead.⁹ One graduation song pushed her into hip-hop.

When she entered NCCU, she did not initially know the school had a hip-hop club. In the second semester of her freshman year, a friend from another school pointed it out, and only then did she discover that NCCU had “Afro Music” for her to join.¹⁰ The club’s full name is National Chengchi University Afro Music. Founded in 2003, it took that name to distinguish itself from NTU Hip-Hop Research and Tamkang University’s Moin, which were more focused on hip-hop information, and to bring styles such as soul and rhythm and blues into the club’s core.¹¹ Her reason for joining was plain. As she later said at a Taipei Music Center talk: “At the time, I really just wanted somewhere to go after class.”¹²

That wish to have somewhere to go after class later became a Golden Melody Award for Best New Artist.

Many people first noticed her through a cypher released by NCCU Afro Music on September 9, 2018, called “ISO 9000.”¹³ A cypher is a form in which a group takes turns rapping in relay, without the competitive or critical nature of a battle. Among university hip-hop clubs that year, this cypher drew particular discussion. Amid a lineup of rappers taking turns, her languid, jazz-inflected voice, in Business Weekly’s phrasing, “was remembered as soon as she opened her mouth.”¹⁴ At the time, trap was mainstream in hip-hop; her literati-tinged, lazy and drifting voice moved in exactly the opposite direction, which made it a subject of online discussion.¹⁵

NCCU Afro Music official channel: the cypher “ISO 9000.” A group of students take turns rapping in relay; Hsien-Ching Chen, appearing in the middle of the video, has a languid, jazz-inflected voice that “was remembered as soon as she opened her mouth.” Her public starting point was in this university-club video.

In the club, she belonged to the group responsible for lyric writing and rap.¹⁶ What truly made her different from rappers of her generation was what she used to feed her lyrics.

Someone Who Could Not Understand Hsia Yu Wrote a Song to Answer Her

To understand Hsien-Ching Chen, one first has to understand what was on her bookshelf. In lyric writing, the person who inspired her most was Hsia Yu, one of Taiwan’s most important contemporary poets. Born in 1956, Hsia Yu marked the rise of postmodern poetry in Taiwan with collections such as Memorandum and Ventriloquy. When Chen was asked why she liked Hsia Yu, her first answer was: “She’s violent!” When the interviewer asked which other writers she liked besides Hsia Yu, she named Li Wei-ching, giving a reason that connected them: “Li Wei-ching and Hsia Yu both reveal a kind of cool violence between the lines, like having your hand scraped by ice. It hurts, but it doesn’t bleed.”¹⁷

Having your hand scraped by ice: it hurts, but it doesn’t bleed. That a 21-year-old rapper could describe the feeling of reading poetry this way already shows that she is not, in the ordinary sense, merely the kind of rapper who “can rhyme.”

What fascinated her was Hsia Yu’s way of playing with parts of speech. Where an ordinary person might say “he is playing with me,” Hsia Yu might write “he is gaming me,” letting words break free from fixed parts of speech and structures. To Chen, that was a form of freedom. She paid particular attention to Hsia Yu’s habit of placing connective words at the ends of lines, giving the poems a continuous life force that never quite breaks cleanly.¹⁸ These observations later returned to Chen’s rap. She has said that “the rhythm of poetry is actually quite similar to rap”: it does not demand rhyme in every line, yet it still values rhythm. And “everyone reads poetry with different ideas of where the line breaks are, which also gives a poem hundreds of ways to be felt.”¹⁹ She has also spoken about how she loosened her obsession with rhyme: “For a while I was very fixated on rhyming. I wanted every line to rhyme! But now I think it’s best to let the words develop freely.”²⁰

It is here that one of the most beautiful truths in her entire body of work is hidden, and this truth is often misstated.

The most widely circulated claim is that “Some People Blame Us for Not Going Deep Enough” was “adapted from Hsia Yu’s poem.” That is incorrect. On her own StreetVoice song page, Chen herself wrote it clearly: “The ten characters ‘some people blame us for not going deep enough’ come from Hsia Yu’s poetry collection of the same title.”²¹ What she borrowed was the ten-character title. The entire lyric is her own original work, with no textual overlap with Hsia Yu’s poem. Hsia Yu’s poem opens, “I carried a bouquet of red roses to visit my lover buried in the earth,” which is completely different from what Chen sings.²²

Closer to the truth, and more moving, is her motive for writing the song. According to what she has said in interviews, she originally could not understand what Hsia Yu was trying to say, so she wrote this song: “Once I wrote it, I understood.”²³ She did not rewrite Hsia Yu’s lines. She used a rap song of her own to respond to Hsia Yu and force herself to understand Hsia Yu. She borrowed the poem’s title as a door, then walked in herself to look for an answer.

So the song’s original intent grows out of the same question as Hsia Yu’s title. Chen has said the song is about this: “Everyone thinks that being good friends means knowing everything about each other, but actually we can never truly understand another person.”²⁴ We can never truly understand another person: this is another way of saying “not deep enough.” She did not adapt Hsia Yu. She answered Hsia Yu.

Hsien-Ching Chen’s official channel: “Some People Blame Us for Not Going Deep Enough.” The title borrows the ten characters of Hsia Yu’s poem of the same name; the whole lyric is Chen’s own answer to the idea that “we can never truly understand another person.”

And this road from poetry to rap eventually circled back to its starting point. She began making rap because she was inspired by Soft Lipa; when she talked about him, she would “reveal a shy young-girl smile, paired with her signature thumbs-up gesture.” The label she later signed with was KAO!INC., the same label Soft Lipa belonged to.²⁵ From Tu Chen-hsi in Tainan, who used jazz and urban feeling to write “light rap,” to Hsien-Ching Chen in Taipei, who wrote Hsia Yu’s cold violence into breathy vocals, this lyrical-rap lineage in Taiwan connected under the roof of KAO!INC.

Four Million Views Grown in a Bedroom

After thinking through the poetry, the next question is: how does a university student get her voice into earphones all across Taiwan?

The answer lies in StreetVoice plus YouTube, not in any agency. “Some People Blame Us for Not Going Deep Enough” was posted on PTT’s Hip-Hop board in October 2018, where the comments were broadly favorable. One user praised her “very distinctive voice” and said “the lyrics and flow are also very interesting”; another wrote, “These lyrics really have mood and imaginative space.”²⁶ Two months later, on December 21, 2018, she released “Gently,” a collaboration with producer Sōryo. Sōryo is a new-generation Taiwanese arranger-producer, a Soochow University alumnus whose real name has not been made public, and later became her regular beatmaker.²⁷ The official description of “Gently” was only one sentence: “A love song by a bird.”²⁸

That love song by a bird, according to Business Weekly, accumulated more than 4 million views.⁴ Without a record company pouring in resources, a bedroom-level production rolled itself to that number through algorithms and sharing. She became famous before releasing her first album. In the logic of the record industry, this is almost inverted: others usually sign first, release an album first, and then become popular. She became popular for seven years before filling in the album.

Hsien-Ching Chen’s official channel: “Gently” Official Visual, a collaboration with producer Sōryo. Its official description was only “A love song by a bird,” yet without record-company push, it accumulated more than four million online views according to Business Weekly.

She has also been honest about how this kind of “fame” felt. In her English-language interview with The Perfect Magazine, when discussing the views for the single “Call In,” she said: “I just happened to realise it had surpassed one million views one day.” In the same interview, she said two other very Chen-like things: “I feel like I haven't become a musician yet,” and “I'm lazy in every way.”²⁹

“I haven’t become a musician yet”: that was what she said in 2021, the year she appeared on Gucci’s cover.

When Gucci Found Her, She Had Not Yet Released a Single Album

On March 29, 2021, the inaugural issue of The Perfect Magazine was published. The magazine was planned by former Love editor-in-chief Katie Grand and funded by Gucci. Its cover theme was “Notes from the Underground,” bringing together 11 international musicians, photographed by Malaysia-born Zhong Lin. Hsien-Ching Chen was one of them.³⁰ Gucci’s official Instagram then featured the cover set, and Taiwanese media consistently reported that she had “become the first Taiwanese hip-hop artist to appear on Gucci’s official Instagram.”³¹

To see this clearly, one has to remember who she was at the time: a graduate of NCCU who had not released any official album, with all of her work posted on StreetVoice and YouTube. The lens of international fashion found her first, earlier than Taiwan’s own record-industry system.

That international line later extended into March 2025, when she appeared at the Taiwan Beats Showcase at SXSW, organized by the Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development under Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, and performed in Austin, Texas, alongside Sōryo.³² A voice that had grown out of a bedroom and a university club looped around onto an international stage. What it relied on, all along, was the work itself surviving online first, not the push of any label.

But the light of fashion magazines and international music festivals does not shine into everyday life for the Taiwanese public. For most people in Taiwan, getting to know Hsien-Ching Chen would require another four-year wait, until the moment when she finally gathered her work into physical form.

One Album, Made Into Two Versions

On March 7, 2025, Hsien-Ching Chen released her first album. Or rather, two albums.³³

It was a very Chen decision: she took the same batch of songs and made two completely different versions. The CD version, titled If Every Day Could Be Happy Happy Who Would Want to Be Sad:＊- The Secret of Collaboration, was co-produced by Chung Wei-yu and Chen, and brought in producers including Cheng Chao-yuan, Sōryo, and Flowstrong; it was a collage about “collaboration.” The vinyl version, titled If Every Day Could Be Happy Happy Who Would Want to Be Sad:)) - Let’s Go on Vacation Together, was produced by Jerry Li, recorded in Taichung, and brought in musicians including Tsun Lung from Sunset Rollercoaster, giving it the live feel of an onstage band. The two records used almost the same tracklist, but the arrangements, producers, musicians, and sequencing were all different.³⁴

After eight years without an album, her first release split itself into two ways of listening. This was precisely the practice of her belief that “one song can have hundreds of ways to be felt”: the same poem feels different when the line breaks change; the same batch of songs becomes two albums when the arrangements change.

Rock Mobile official channel: the vinyl version’s title track, “If Every Day Could Be Happy Happy Who Would Want to Be Sad:)),” produced by Jerry Li with a live-band feel. This was also the work that earned her a nomination for Song of the Year at the 37th Golden Melody Awards.

The album was first heard at the 16th Golden Indie Music Awards in 2025. Chen won three awards in one go: Best New Artist, Best Hip-Hop Song for “Vacuum Cleaner Vitamin,” and Best Alternative Pop Album for the vinyl version.³⁵ The Golden Indie Music Awards specifically honor creation and independent music in Taiwan; industry insiders stamped her work first with three trophies.

In fact, Chen’s award history did not begin with the Golden Melody Awards. As early as 2023, she had collaborated with Leo Wang on “A No Is a No,” the ending theme for the Netflix series Wave Makers. The song won Original Song for a Drama Program at the 58th Golden Bell Awards.³⁶ The Golden Bell Awards are television awards, distinct from the music-focused Golden Melody Awards.

Golden Bell Awards official channel: “A No Is a No” by Leo Wang, Hsien-Ching Chen, Jerry Li, and Tang Chieh, the ending theme for Wave Makers, won Original Song for a Drama Program at the 58th Golden Bell Awards in 2023. Before Chen was a Golden Melody “new artist,” she already had a Golden Bell on her résumé.

Seen this way, the Golden Melody Best New Artist award in 2026 was hardly her first honor: a Golden Bell for original drama song, three Golden Indie awards, and then the Golden Melody Award for Best New Artist. For a “new artist,” the awards had already begun to form a line.

Golden Melody New Artist, Eighth Year of Making Music

Return to the night of June 27, 2026. At the 37th Golden Melody Awards, Hsien-Ching Chen was nominated in three categories: Best New Artist, Best Mandarin Female Singer, and Song of the Year.³⁷ She ultimately won Best New Artist. Best Mandarin Female Singer went to Jolin Tsai for Pleasure, and Song of the Year went to A-Lin’s “Singing with Happiness,” leaving Chen nominated but not awarded in those two categories.³⁸ A person nominated for Best Mandarin Female Singer was also a “new artist.” The list itself put the contradiction on display.

By Golden Melody Awards custom, the Best New Artist winner must immediately go onstage to perform. She sang “New notes” from the album, in her usual extremely relaxed, breathy, drifting manner. Once the livestream went out, discussion exploded.

Much of the reaction from viewers was “can’t understand her.” Bullet comments and social media concentrated around remarks such as “I really can’t understand,” “her diction is so unclear,” “I don’t know what I’m watching,” and “no highlights at all.” Some mocked her by asking, “Is it trendy again to sing like you have a braised egg in your mouth?” Others described her as “so nervous her throat was locked.”³⁹ The comment most worth pausing on came from a Threads user: “Sister, I really can’t quite get what’s going on, and it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with rap.”⁴⁰ This was someone who saw themselves as familiar with rap, and even they could not get in. The confusion was real.

But on the same night, another group of people was translating for her. Someone wrote, “In this field, Chen really is a genius; it’s just that very few people listen to jazz rap.” Someone else said, “Finally, the public has discovered this treasure.” Another person recalled an older Taiwanese memory: “Although I can’t understand what she’s singing, Jay Chou was the same way back then. Keep going.”⁴¹ When Jay Chou debuted, people across Taiwan also complained that his diction was unclear. The comparison is like a mirror, showing that “not understanding” has happened more than once in the history of Taiwanese pop music.

📝 Curator’s Note
Treating “can’t understand her” as Chen’s flaw reverses cause and effect. Jazz rap, breathy vocals, and blurred diction have been part of her style since “ISO 9000,” and people inside the scene have listened with pleasure for seven years. This way of singing was not a mistake that suddenly happened on Golden Melody night. It had always been there. The public simply had not encountered it in large numbers before. What the Golden Melody livestream did was abruptly push a niche style in front of millions of people, causing “can’t understand her” to surge collectively. So what really happened that night was that a road people had not learned to hear was, for the first time, inspected by so many ears at once. What could not be understood was never her diction. It was the ears that had not yet learned to read this road.

She of course knows that people find her hard to understand. Looking at it honestly, the opposing view is not merely a matter of passersby being unaccustomed to her. Her live stage presence is too relaxed, and in an amplified setting like the Golden Melody Awards, it can seem short on energy; these are valid criticisms. Her being dubbed “Taiwan’s Billie Eilish” may help people unfamiliar with her place her quickly, but that lazy label also flattens the Taiwanese-language undertone and the texture of Mandarin rap in her work.⁴² These are all prices that this road has to pay: on a road no one has paved before, the person walking it inevitably has to bear the fact that the people watching are not yet ready.

And her attitude toward “being understood” has always been clear. She has said in interviews that she later realized that although some people would ask her to be clearer, “making others completely understand” should not be her goal.⁴³

That is why the Golden Melody trophy for Best New Artist looks so strange in her hands. It is supposed to be given to a newcomer just starting out, whose future is still unwritten. But the person who received it had already passed through a breakout song, an international cover, three Golden Indie awards, and one Golden Bell Award. The trophy did not recognize the beginning of a person. It recognized that a road had finally been seen: a road that began at NCCU Afro Music, was made in a bedroom, answered poetry through rap, and grew a singer through the internet.

On the night her phone was taken away, she said it “felt like I wasn’t here.” Perhaps she was more precise than she realized. For eight years, she had been present: in earphones, on StreetVoice, on Gucci’s cover, among three Golden Indie trophies. It was only that most people in Taiwan looked up for the first time that night and discovered that she had already been standing there all along.

Further Reading:

• Taiwanese Hip-Hop and Rap Development: how Soft Lipa, KAO!INC., and Taiwanese rap grew from the underground into the mainstream
• From Deserts Chang to Anpu: another Taiwanese female voice that wrote literature and poeticity into song
• Taiwanese Independent Music: how the StreetVoice generation grew by bypassing record companies
• Taiwanese Pop Music: the full arc from the record industry to the streaming era
• Golden Melody Awards: how the Golden Melody system defines “new artist” and “Mandarin female singer”

References