Hsu, Valen

Born in Taipei, Taiwan on 20 September 1974, Valen Hsu (also known as Xu Ru Yun) started playing the piano at 4 years. While she was attending high school in 1993, she was discovered while performing in a restaurant in Taipei, where many known pop artists began their careers. She was offered a contract with Taiwan’s What’s Music Record label and began work on her first album, all before the age of 19.

Valen Hsu recorded 14 studio albums over the span of eight years, as well as releasing four compilation albums. Her first album, Tau Hao, was completed in 1994 and received critical acclaim from the Asian music industry. It featured a Mandarin cover version of The Man With The Child In His Eyes. However, record sales did not exceed expectations, only selling a little over 50,000 copies. Her next studio album was what significantly changed her career. Lei Hai (‘Tear Sea’), sold more than 300,000 copies in Taiwan. The album featured a Mandarin cover version of Moving. Her third album, ‘If the Cloud Knows’ was even more successful, selling over 2.2 million copies. She quickly became a household name in the Asian pop scene. In 1999, after the sale of What’s Music to Universal Records (Taiwan), she recorded a duet with Enrique Iglesias entitled ‘You’re My No. 1’, released on Enrique’s Asian version of Enrique’s album.

Also in 1999, she traveled to Rwanda, Africa together with other Asian celebrities for the World Health Organization to perform charity work, filming a commercial and raising funds for donation through sales of an E.P. entitled Wo Niu (which means “Snail”), written by Jay Chou, one of Asia’s male mega pop stars.

As her music career continued, she also appeared in movies and theatre productions. Between 2003 and 2011, Hsu also released a handful of books, featuring poems, photos or health and wellness tips.