Influences: music

Without receiving any formal training, Qing-Feng Wu taught himself piano and music theory out of interest. As Qing-Feng Wu's elder sister started to learn to play the piano when he was an elementary school student, he used to observe her playing and practiced secretly when no one else was home. Qing-Feng Wu enjoyed going to record shops and only listened to classical music, such as the works of Claude Debussy, Erik Satie along with several of his favorite composers.^[6]

When he was in junior high school, he listened to Faye Wong's album Sky given by his elder sister, and since then, he "has started to listen to all kinds of genres". He talked about it in an interview:

"Retrospectively, that was the time when music was truly beautiful...from 1994 to 2000. To me, the songs of those years are the most impressive. It probably has something to do with my adolescence. Many of the songs from that time are even more trendy and edgier than those now".^[7]

Qing-Feng Wu is deeply inspired by the following music artists: Faye Wong, A-Mei,^[8] Faith Yang, Jeff Buckley, Tori Amos, Björk, Ringo Sheena, Radiohead, Chyi Yu and Ai Jing. Qing-Feng Wu has often covered the works of the above artists in his performance.

Influences: writing

Qing-Feng Wu has always been highly sensitive to words. At the age of 3 or 4, he was taught to write Chinese characters by his grandfather. Whenever there were visitors coming, his grandfather would have him recognize words and recite newspaper aloud as a performance. Qing-Feng Wu therefore was able to recognize a great number of words at a very young age. When he was an elementary school boy, he even edited a personal dictionary by comparing several dictionaries.^[9] When in college, Qing-Feng Wu admired contemporary poets Hsia-Yu (Katie Lee, 夏宇) and Li Chen (陳黎). Qing-Feng's lyrics style has partially inherited the experimentalism and the deconstructive method linguistically and syntactically from the two poets. He also mentioned that the foundation of his lyrics writing may have been built along the process of word-recognition and his habit of reading Chinese dictionaries as a child.^[10]

Early works

Qing-Feng Wu first tried to create music when he was in the third year of senior high school after participating in the school music competition Tien-Yun Award (天韻獎). Although he signed up for the competition without having any works ready, he soon wrote his first song Peeping (窺) and more than a dozen songs were composed one after another in the same month.^[11] In the end, he won the championship in the Composition Category with his work Peeping and another championship in the Solo Singing Category by performing Tanya Chua's Ji Nian (紀念, Remember). Qing-Feng Wu once mentioned that if he had not won first prize at Tien-Yun Award for Composition Category, he would not have realized that he was able to write songs and might have never thought about writing any other songs.^[12]

In order to sign up for NCCU Golden Melody (政大金旋獎) in 2001, he started the band Sodagreen with Claire Hsieh, Jyun-Wei Shih and his high school friend Xin-Ge (新哥). By covering Stefanie Sun's My Desired Happiness (我要的幸福), he entered the Solo Singing Final and the Composition Final at NCCU Golden Melody Award with his work Be Late For One Thousand Years (遲到千年).^[13] In 2002 Sodagreen participated in NCCU Golden Melody Award again and not only did they win the championship in the Team Category with the work Audiovisual And Illusion In The Air, but also won three more prizes, including the championship, Best Lyrics and Best Composition in Composition Category with the work Flying Fish (飛魚). From2001 to 2004, Qing-Feng Wu completed more than 100 songs.^[14] About half of them became the works for Sodagreen and the rest of the songs were successively used by other artists.

2004 – Present: Sodagreen

On May 30, 2004, Sodagreen had the concert School Rock at NCCU and released the single Audiovisual And Illusion In The Air (空氣中的視聽與幻覺) as their official debut. Since then, Qing-Feng Wu has participated in various music collaborations as an individual aside from performing and releasing works with Sodagreen. The collaborations include:

• In 2004, "Ms. Pheromone (費洛蒙小姐)" in the stage play Touching Skin (踏青去) is Qing-Feng Wu's first music composition for the lyrics.^[15]
• In 2004, Faith Yang's song "Nu Jue (女爵, Dame)" is Qing-Feng Wu's first custom-made work for an artist.^[16]
• In 2005, Qing-Feng Wu featured in Makiyo Kawashima (川島茱樹代) 's studio album Makiyo and Rene Liu's studio album Heard.^[17]

2018 – present: Solo work

On January 1, 2017, Sodagreen finished their final performance and went hiatus. After taking a break for a year, Qing-Feng Wu announced to embark his solo career officially in Spring 2018, attending Spring Wave Music and Art Festival (春浪音樂節) in May as the first performance of his return.^[18] Since going solo, Qing-Feng Wu has dabbled in numerous new fields, including self-teaching formal music arrangement on computer, releasing the EP Everybody Woohoo that is pop-oriented, mentoring participants in the idol-oriented talent shows.^[19]

• In June 2018, Qing-Feng Wu took part in the talent show The Coming One 2 (明日之子 第二季) produced by Tencent Video. He was a "Xing Tui Guan (星推官)", an advisor as well as a judge, in the "Du Xiu Sai Dao"(獨秀賽道, Solo Race Track) of the show, leading participants including Wei-Ze Cai (蔡維澤), Lumi Xu (許含光), Yi-Hao Zhang (張洢豪) and Yu-Ming Ceng (曾育茗).^[20]
• In January 2019, Qing-Feng Wu attended the talent show Singer 2019 (歌手2019) produced by Hunan Television as a "Chuan Jiang Ren"(串講人, host) and also joined the competition in the show.
• In September 2019, Qing-Feng Wu released his debut solo album Spaceman and started his Space In Space (太空備忘記) Concert Tour which was unfortunately cancelled in 2020 due to the outbreak of COVID-19.
• On November 14 and 15 2020, at Cloud Gate Theater in Tamsui, Qing-Feng Wu had Recto and Verso (上下冊) Concert, combining music performance with theatrical elements to create a brand new show experience.^[21]

Lyrics

Wu's lyrics have introduced the art of literacy to Mandopop. The topics range from the gazes at personal life experiences to the social depiction and its allegory.^[22] In 2009, Qing-Feng's Be Late For One Thousand Years was selected to be a rhetoric material in the Chinese textbook for the second-year junior high school students.^[23]

Vocals

Qing-Feng Wu is good at singing with mixed voice ( a mixture of true voice and falsetto voice close to head voice), and with his nasal resonance, he can transit between true voice and falsetto seamlessly. His singing technique has forged a genderless voice.^[24] Qing-Feng Wu's way of singing also has something to do with his deviated nasal septum. His vocal range lies between A2 to C6, stretching over 26 intervals and owning more than 3 octaves, making him a singer with a very wide vocal range in Mandopop.^[25]

Extended plays

Studio albums

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Singles

Other contributions