Photographs by Lee-Ann Richer.
Let’s talk about China. Fundamentally a communist country, the Chinese government, consist of the China’s Communist party, had proved itself to be the greatest Capitalists in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. They’d learned from the West and had reproduced the exact products ten times cheaper using the Chinese work force, sometimes for the neighbours markets, and sometimes back to where the original products were from. Over the past couple of years, Chinese economy had experienced a historic boost which, consequently, produced, for the first time in history, more billionaires than the United States. And so the trend of the newly found expensive taste among the Chinese elite, not only survived but flourished beyond outsiders’s wildest imagination.
As a result of this cultural shift, a new form of media, art, and artists were created in China, which just like the manufacturing experiment, took the Western example and reproduced into a Chinese model. The 24 year old singer-songwriter Gloria Tang Tsz-kei, famously known as G.E.M. is one of the most successful examples of this new wave of Westernized Chinese artists, and she’s doing a great job representing this cultural shift.
All the way from her native China, G.E.M., the acronym for Get Everybody Moving, was back at Toronto’s grand Air Canada Centre, this time with her X.X.X world tour to excite her fans in the greatest multicultural city in the world. And indeed, where better than Toronto to perform a perfect example of a globalized music, art, and performance, a fusion of Western music with Eastern artistry expressed through both English and Mandarin languages, produced in the mixture of disco, electronic, pop, and dance music styles for a packed house filled with the audience beyond political, ideological, racial, and linguistic borders, all together for the love of world class entertainment.
With incredible light shows, well designed video projections, and great sound mix, G.E.M. sang, danced, and played piano, sometimes all at the same time, along with her band of musicians, dancers, singers to once again remind us, that we are living in a world that is becoming one through the desire of it’s younger generation who cares for none but entertainment, joy, and experiment with what’s fresh, different, and new, all that was promised and well delivered by young talented G.E.M. and her experienced brilliant production team. Well done, and I’m looking forward to see and hear much more.
