Jess Lee

From Seremban to a Taipei talent show

Jess Lee was born Li Jiawei on 1 June 1988 in Seremban, the capital of Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia, into a family of Hakka descent with ancestral roots in Meizhou, Guangdong. She began formal vocal training at eight. Her first attempt at television came at home on Malaysian Idol, where she was eliminated in the top-20 round, an early setback she has since outlasted several times over.

Music was not the plan. She read chemistry at the National University of Malaysia and carried on with the subject at National Taiwan University, which is what put her in Taipei when the seventh season of One Million Star, the island's most watched televised singing contest, began casting in 2010. She won the series on 30 January 2011 with four consecutive perfect scores from the judges, becoming the first Malaysian to take the title. Warner Music Taiwan signed her within months.

The Warner years and the song that never went away

Her debut album Thanks to My Lover (感謝愛人) arrived on 16 September 2011 and carried Torment (煎熬), the power ballad that remains her calling card and the one audiences still sing back to her at full volume. The record earned a Best New Artist nomination at the 23rd Golden Melody Awards in 2012, and she collected three prizes at the MY Astro Supreme Pop Chart Awards the same year.

The follow-up, Heaven/Cliff (天堂/懸崖), came on 17 March 2014 with Like Heaven's Cliff and Can't Help Missing, and that year she also took the singer's prize on the second season of Anhui TV's I'm a Singer Maniac. Love Storm (愛的風暴) on 6 May 2016 produced Chain Love (鍊愛), which won a Billboard Radio China top-ten Chinese golden melody award in 2017. The same year she played her first outdoor solo concert and was named Best Female Singer at the AIM Chinese Music Awards.

The Opposite of Yes (相反的是), released on 8 June 2018, was the last album of the Warner run, and she picked up a HITO Pop Music Awards prize in 2019 before the contract ended in 2020. By then the pattern was set: a big-voiced singer with a devoted audience in Taiwan, Malaysia and mainland China, but without the mainstream television platform that turns a ballad specialist into a household name.

A new label and a small tour that restarted things

Lee signed with Hei Lai Music (黑籟音樂) in 2022 and released Happiness (痛快) on 26 July that year, an album issued in three parts. The Asian Pop Music Awards listed it among its top 20 Chinese albums on 28 December 2022. In 2023 she sat as a judge on a Taiwan Television variety show, and through 2024 she recorded a run of theme and insert songs for television dramas, the kind of work that keeps a voice in circulation between records.

The three-track EP Luminous Person (會發光的人) followed on 1 November 2024 and gave its name to a short tour: Shanghai on 26 October 2024, Beijing on 16 November, Guangzhou on 7 December, and a New York date on 8 March 2025. She also sang the theme Sweet Dreams, My Dear for the game Lost Ark, released on 19 December 2024. None of it was headline news, but it meant she had a working live show and fresh material when the biggest offer of her career came in.

Singer 2025: the comeback round

Singer 2025, the Hunan TV and Mango TV competition, brought Lee in as a challenger on 4 July 2025 in its eighth episode. She sang a cover of Chen Shiian's Diva (天后) and recorded a 94.5 per cent approval rating from the 460-strong studio jury, and the performance went to number one on Weibo's trending list. Hunan TV's own press release, carried by Bernama on 18 July 2025, described her as a Malaysian powerhouse and framed the appearance as a return after time away from the spotlight. Tourism Malaysia's deputy director-general Lee Thai Hung called her participation a bridge between Malaysia and China.

On 1 August she took the breakthrough round with a version of 千年之戀, originally by Shin and Princess Ai, and advanced directly to the final. On 8 August she finished fourth in the contest for the King of Singers title. Fourth place on paper undersells the effect: the Diva clip is the moment most viewers now associate with her, and it reset her standing in the mainland market almost overnight.

The rest of 2025 confirmed the shift. She won the overall championship on the battle season of 百分百歌手 and was named most expressive vocalist at the Weibo Music Awards. In 2026 she added an outstanding vocalist award at the Bazaar Art aesthetics gala and a most expressive singer award at Weibo's cultural exchange night for Malaysia.

Where she stands now: a viral single and the first arena tour

The new material has come quickly. Annual Summary (年度總結) was released on 29 January 2026, The Taboo of Heartbeat (心動的禁忌) on 8 March and 3am Holding Your Hand (3am牽着你) on 1 June. Then on 2 July came 甲乙丙丁 (你我怎麼兩清), a break-up ballad whose chorus asks how two people are supposed to settle accounts and go back to being strangers. By 2 August it had passed 800 million views on short-video platforms and was sitting at the top of several streaming charts. A Cantonese version, ABCD, followed on 3 September 2026.

The tour built around this run is called 能·亮, roughly Can and Shine, and it is the first time she has headlined indoor arenas holding thousands. The organisers' Guangzhou listing describes the show as an energy charging field, with the first character standing for her habit of pushing past her own limits and the second for a kind of awakening. Lee's own announcement post on 15 February 2026 put it more simply, saying the show is about everyone's story and that she wants people to leave feeling they can shine on their own.

The Hangzhou opener on 28 March 2026 went on sale on 9 March and sold out within minutes; Mirror Daily reported 5,000 tickets gone in a single minute. Guangzhou followed at the Asian Games City Gymnasium on 18 April, Changsha at the Helong Gymnasium on 23 May after a presale that opened on 20 April, and a Wuxi date set for 30 May at the Wuxi Sports Centre Gymnasium was postponed. The next confirmed stop is Shenzhen's Bao'an Sports Centre Gymnasium on 24 October 2026, with tickets in five tiers from 380 to 880 yuan and further cities listed as awaiting sale.