CoCo Lee (李玟, January 17, 1975–July 5, 2023) was a trailblazing Chinese American singer-songwriter and global superstar who made history as the first Asian artist to successfully break into the American music mainstream, opening new doors for Chinese artists on the global stage.
Born in Hong Kong and raised in San Francisco, Lee initially did not have any aspirations to become a singer. Rather, she planned to enroll at the University of California, Irvine to pursue pre-med studies so that she could one day work alongside her mother, a doctor. However, during a family vacation to Hong Kong after graduating high school in 1993, she entered a TVB singing competition on a whim and was discovered—launching a whirlwind career that began with the release of her debut album, I’m Still Your Lover, in Taiwan in 1994.
Lee’s music was shaped by the artists she grew up listening to in the 1980s and ’90s such as Whitney Houston, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Mariah Carey. Adapting the licks and riffs of R&B to Cantonese, however, proved difficult due to the language’s highly tonal structure. To more fully pursue the musical style she loved, Lee taught herself Mandarin, whose greater tonal flexibility proved more conducive to R&B. Her unique American R&B–influenced approach to Asian pop was widely embraced across Asia. In an era dominated by demure female balladeers, Li Wen—as she was known in the Chinese-speaking world—distinguished herself with a confident persona, bold choreography, and vividly colored hair. She released seven albums within 18 months to immense success.
The feature spread above was part of an interview and photoshoot that A. Magazine conducted in 2000 capturing the historic moment when Lee made her attempt to cross over into the American music scene. Although she was already a platinum-selling artist on par with Celine Dion and Mariah Carey in Asia, she was still relatively unknown in the United States. Signed to Sony’s Epic Records for her U.S. debut, Lee was compared to the label’s pioneering Latin artists—Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, and Jennifer Lopez—with hopes that she would be the first to similarly “explode the market” for Asian artists.
The many peaks of Lee’s remarkable three-decade career include voicing the character of Disney’s Mulan in the Mandarin version of the film alongside action-star Jackie Chan, and singing “A Love Before Time,” an Oscar-nominated Best Original Song from Ang Lee’s, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 2001, Lee performed the song live at the 73rd Academy Awards, making her the first Chinese singer to perform at the Oscars.
Lee’s music continues to resonate today, particularly among Chinese and Chinese American millennials across the diaspora, who grew up listening to her soulful and urban beats in both English and Chinese.