Bobby Chen

Changhua, Taipei, and a decade in the back office

Chen was born on 29 October 1958 in Xizhou, a farming township in Changhua County on Taiwan's western plain. He has described himself as the only boy who entered the singing competition on behalf of his school choir, though the childhood ambition was painting rather than music. The move to Taipei brought a string of ordinary jobs — car repair and commercial art among them — before music became the one that paid.

His entry into the industry came through the studio rather than the stage. In 1982 he began working as an assistant to Liu Chia-chang, one of the era's dominant Mandarin-pop producers, and moved gradually from technical work into composition. His own debut album did not appear until 1988, when he was approaching thirty. Its title track, Crowded Paradise, is still the song he uses to close concerts nearly four decades on.

The band, the Hakka detour, and the songs that stuck

Four years after the debut, in 1992, Chen formed the New Formosa Band with Huang Lianyu. The pairing was built around writing and singing in Taiwanese and Hakka alongside Mandarin, at a point when Mandarin-only pop was the commercial default across the region. The band has run in parallel with his solo catalogue ever since rather than replacing it.

The songs that carried furthest are mid-tempo and plainly sung: Leave the Sadness to Myself, Kite, Hen Qing Ge, The Last Tenderness, and One Night in Beijing, which has outlived most of what surrounded it. Chen also spent years producing for other artists, including Rene Liu, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Richie Jen, and has worked outside music as a magazine columnist, novelist, music-video director and painter — the last of which has become a recurring part of his end-of-year activity.

Two episodes have shaped how he is covered in Taiwan. In 2002 he was badly assaulted in a Taipei pub, sustaining a brain bleed that required surgery; the resulting court case ran for five years. In 2014 his criticism of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, and subsequent remarks about mainland visitors, drew a backlash in China that cost him performance opportunities there and saw his catalogue pulled from mainland streaming platforms. The commercial consequence has been real; the standing it bought him with part of his home audience has been just as real.

The New Year's Eve habit

The spine of Chen's year is a single concert. Since the mid-1990s he has played a New Year's Eve show, for most of that run at the Taipei International Convention Center, and the sequence has become the thing he is best known for among people who have never bought one of his records. A mouth tumour diagnosed in 2019 interrupted the run.

The recent pattern has been a record and an exhibition timed to the concert. The album Wang Xiang was released on 8 December 2024 ahead of the thirtieth edition of the show on 31 December that year, with a new-songs gig in his Changhua hometown on 11 November and a December exhibition of more than eighty coloured-pencil works.

The 2025–26 edition was announced on 22 October 2025, after a year in which Chen had travelled from Tierra del Fuego to Hokkaido. Billed as his thirty-first New Year's Eve concert and titled Not a Rockstar, it put floor tickets at NT$1,500 to NT$3,800 on sale from midday on 30 October 2025, with an online stream at NT$949 and an early-bird stream price of NT$749 before 15 December.

2026: a record out, an exhibition off

The album Not a Rockstar arrived digitally on 6 February 2026 through Rock Records: ten tracks, among them Revolutionary, Vagrant Bird, Drill Baby Drill, Fragile Friday, You're a Stranger and Wrong Love. The framing around it is a look back over thirty-seven years of writing, with arrangements that reach for 1980s and 1990s textures without presenting themselves as a nostalgia exercise. Chen's own line on the title is that he has not earned the description — he would rather be a wandering poet who tells stories in songs. On Douban it sits at 7.4 out of 10 from roughly 290 ratings. The physical CD slipped behind the digital release after a printing error and was pushed into March.

The companion exhibition did not happen. Tainan Art Museum had scheduled I Am a Rock Painter: 2026 Chen Sheng Solo Exhibition over the Lunar New Year period, with a sing-and-play session on the fifth day of the new year. On 5 February 2026 the museum announced a postponement, citing funding considerations and incomplete review procedures. That statement drew criticism, and brought back into circulation a 2023 allegation of inappropriate remarks to a female designer, for which Chen had apologised publicly at the time. On 9 February the museum issued a second statement confirming cancellation, saying Chen's team had asked to end the collaboration, and the exhibition pages were taken down.

What follows is a touring year rather than a promotional one. The record is out, the gallery plan is gone, and the dates on the books are overseas.

What the show is now

The TICC marathon on 31 December 2025 ran from 20:30 to roughly 01:30 — close to five hours, billed at forty-one songs, with around ten pulled from corners of the catalogue he rarely plays. Chen appeared in a white fringed leather jacket over an orange-red checked shirt and jeans, with a Not A Rockstar baseball cap, and opened not with a song but by naming each member of the band in turn. He premiered the new song Phoenix City, digressed about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, admitted that he keeps feelings bottled up until they do damage, and marked the first birthday of a granddaughter born on a New Year's Eve with a cake brought out from backstage. His stated wish for the year ahead was to climb Mount Fuji at seventy with his brother and his uncle. During Leave the Sadness to Myself and Kite he walked off the stage and into the seats to shake hands. After the countdown he came back in an encore T-shirt for a full-room singalong of Taiwan Hao, then finished on Crowded Paradise, the 1988 debut's title track.

The overseas shows are a compressed version of the same thing. The Esplanade Concert Hall in Singapore hosted I Am Not a ROCK Star on 20 September 2025, billed at two hours without an interval, sung in Mandarin, from S$88 with top-price seats at S$188.