Ai Jing

Who is Ai Jing?

Ai Jing is a mainland Chinese singer and painter. China's Northeast News called her "China's most talented female folk rock singer."

Ai was born into a musical family: her father played several instruments, and her mother was a Pingju singer. She attended the Shenyang Special School of Art, joined the Oriental Song and Dance Troupe in Beijing at age 18, and first gained widespread attention with her 1992 song "My 1997". A semi-autobiographical ballad that has been compared to Cui Jian's "Nothing to My Name" in terms of its social impact, the song tells about her love for a man living in Hong Kong, and how she eagerly awaits the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China so she can visit him. After "My 1997", she performed throughout East and Southeast Asia for several years. The music video for her 1993 "Wandering Swallow" won the Chunlan Cup MTV Convention.

Nimrod Baranovitch describes Ai as one of China's first "independent, free, active, dynamic, perhaps even rebellious" female pop stars". She is also known for having written and produced much of her own music, in a time when few Chinese artists were doing so. Much of her music defied stylistic rules and incorporated Western folk and rock styles. But after her early albums, Baranovitch claims, Ai's popularity decreased as her themes became more "personal and nonconformist", and she faced "antagonism" from men within the music industry because she did not sexually objectify herself and because her introduction of new musical styles challenged the male-dominated industry.