Hsu, Yuki
Yuki Hsu is a Taiwanese pop singer. Despite being immensely popular across Asia, she is also widely hated and seems to be controversial for reasons that I, as an English-only speaker, have not quite been able to fully fathom. Her career appears to have peaked in the late '90s, when she released a string of very catchy, original pop/dance singles that stood far above most other Chinese pop. Combine her musical skill with her stunning, supermodel-level good looks and a knack for coming up with clever little dance maneuvers, and you have quite a formidable triple threat. As far as I can tell, it is these very outstanding qualities that make her hated as well; the main motivation seems to be jealousy on the part of her rivals, and even on the part of the public. It's a phenomenon that doesn't happen too often in the West: a celebrity who is so annoyingly perfect in so many ways that people begin to resent her. She also seems to be very reclusive, and rarely gives interviews or acknowledges her fans. (The only other celebrity I can think of who has earned this love-hate dynamic through being a supremely talented loner is baseball slugger Barry Bonds.) The only impact Yuki Hsu has made on Western culture is a quirky series of dance moves she performed in the video for her song "Meow Meow Meow" which were plagiarized in toto by the Spanish girl group Las Ketchup for their massive 2002 hit "Asereje (The Ketchup Song)." The Ketchup Song Dance first caught on in Ibiza and spread from there across Europe and the world; its trajectory was quite similar to that of the Macarena a couple years earlier, though The Ketchup Song never quite reached the same level of ubiquity. In any case, practically no one seems to have noticed that the Ketchup Song Dance was in fact invented by Yuki Hsu, since there are very few people who follow both Asian and Western culture closely enough to notice such a detail. Aside from this, however, I actually know very little about Yuki Hsu, and I'm only making this Wikipedia entry in the hopes that it will inspire someone more knowledgable to create a more informative entry.
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