Fly free, you unhinged peacock
Hello once again! I’m so happy to be here! It was a nice week, September has been lovely so far; the seasonal change has done wonders for my mood, and I’m ready for autumn, but also sad to say goodbye to the summer — as everyone always is, of course. I hope all of you are doing well and that you’re ready for another week of Wang Yibo taking us in all manner of directions.
What did Yibo do this week?
Jimmy Choo finally announced its long-awaited brand sponsorship with Yibo! View the promo video, or the bonus vid on Insta or on TikTok! Grab a cool Yibo-flavored Jimmy Choo poker chip! Join the global fandom in mourning the loss of Yibo’s longstanding love of glamourous Louboutins. Red-soled beauties, we hardly knew ye.
farewell to an iconic duo
Try not to pay attention to the actual shoes Yibo will be wearing henceforth; Jimmy Choo really needs to step up its menswear game. 😬
On the upside, we got a nice (if low-res) photoset of barefaced Yibo, which is always a pleasure! I love how easily he’s switching between idol mode and au naturel mode these days.
Wang Yibo and War of Faith are currently shortlisted for the Audience Choice categories of the annual Golden Eagle TV Awards. These are given out once every two years and are considered among China’s three most prestigious television awards; Yibo won the Audience award for best actor previously in 2020 for his role as Lan Zhan in The Untamed. He’s made it to the second round of voting so I believe he’s officially a finalist, up against people like Wang Hedi for Fairy and Devil and Bai Jingting for (I think?) Always On the Move. There’s also a jury-selected Actor/Actress award, but I believe the nominees for those won’t be announced until just before the ceremony itself, likely not till October.
Also worth noting that the 2020 Golden Eagle Awards gave us Yibo in this confection:
Excited to see what he wears to this year’s ceremony! 🙏
Episodes two and three of Exploring the Unknown appeared; we still don’t have proper English subs, but there are clips being translated across YouTube and various social media channels. Episode 2 sees him and his guide complete their trek through the rainforest. Yibo manages to see some gibbons! Although they only see, like… three gibbons, and tbh if I’d gone through all that trouble, I’d want to be greeted by an entire monkey city ala The Jungle Book. Yibo managed to refrain from hopping on a vine and swinging permanently away from civilization, but we know it was probably a real temptation.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the third episode yet, mainly because he gets altitude sickness in it while mountain climbing, and it seems pretty serious. I just want him to stay safe and sound and protected and healthy and alive, and maybe give him some extra blankets and a chance to sleep in a sensory deprivation chamber once in a while so he can rest properly. But no, he wants to continue this path and talks on the docuseries about how he wants to become a race car driver. I am like Charles Grodin in that famous scene from Midnight Run yelling “These things go down!” but about racecars, not airplanes. Yibo, these things go down!!!!!!
And yet, if Wang Yibo were the kind of person who could be stopped by normal-person objections like “don’t do that, you could die,” he would not be the king we have come to stan.
Dance break
I’ve been rewatching a lot of old Uniq promotional videos this month; they’re all still up on Uniq’s official YouTube channel, and it’s a remarkable glimpse at a group of really genuinely talented artists, albeit a group that, like many K-pop bands, probably needed a bit more polish and a few more years together to reach their potential as a group. These videos are effectively the scattered remnants of their time as a band before they even properly were a band. There’s an awful lot of raw talent packed into these debut videos. I’ve been obsessed with this one in particular, which purports to be a group dance but inevitably just winds up feeling like the Wang Yibo show, even when he’s just vibing in the background.
This is always the thing with Yibo — even when he’s just vibing in the background, he can’t help but draw your attention. The thing that gets me about this vid is that the cameraperson repeatedly centers the camera on Yibo even when someone else is performing. By the end of the video it’s just like, yep, Yibo was the star all along, we gave up trying to front.
You don’t even have to take my word for it, the composure and the presence and intensity he’s got here are just visibly so much more than the others.
I don’t even mean that as a diss towards any of the others, because they’re all doing some very good dancing in this video, and Seungyoun and Wenho are both bringing tons of attitude. It’s just that Yibo is serving a whole different level of commitment to this choreo, to this rapper persona, to the entire idea of wrist game glitter! Do I know what that means? No! Do I feel by the end of this like it means something edgy and authentic that Yibo gets instinctively because he was born with wrist game glitter? Absolutely.
Wang Yibo and the passionate pursuit of creativity
Something I feel like I don’t actually say out loud enough is that there’s a real mental benefit from constantly seeing WYB be so committed to everything he puts his mind to. I have never been sporty to any degree, but in another life I loved hiking and exploring the wilderness, and I loved dancing and swimming and other more movement-related things that my lifestyle kind of naturally took me away from. Watching him not only embrace every kind of sport and fun pasttime he runs across but give it a fair shot until he can say he’s really experienced it makes me think about the way I experience my own life differently.
Yibo’s mountaineering expert, Zhou Peng, shared a Weibo video which the MTJJ wybforever kindly subbed into English on YouTube, in which he discusses how hard Yibo worked to prep for the climb and learn all the safety precautions, and what an attitude of persistence he displayed throughout the whole process. This, again, is what everyone Yibo ever works with says about him, only this time it’s in the context of actually scaling a mountain.
It’s the kind of thing that pushes me, in countless small ways throughout the day, to just… work a little harder, try a little more diligently, do what I actually say I’m going to do instead of being an inconsistent flake. Would I have done that without Yibo anyway? Eh. Maybe. But this way, as I’m doing it, I’m thinking about this kid 7,000 miles away from me who’s grabbing life by both hands and refusing to let go until he’s gotten exactly what he wants out of it. And if he can do that, then surely I can at least [insert thing here].
I feel obliged to note, however, that it’s not just cosmic destiny that put Yibo here, in this position. He has had the incredible fortune of being able to finance his own path from a young age; his parents were able to send him to Beijing to study dance and performance, and then were able to send him to Korea to be a trainee. He was able to leverage an innate level of privilege into rare opportunity. And even now that he’s doing increasingly dangerous hobbies and extreme pursuits, he’s doing them with all of the expertise, safety training, and precautions that extreme wealth can buy. A friend pointed out that in the mountain-climbing scenes from Exploring the Unknown where he’s shown onscreen with just his mountaineering guide, there’s actually a crew of at least four, maybe five other people, including two cameramen, with them. He hasn’t risked as much as other people might have to gain and solidify this reputation of daredevil multi-talented idol-slash-athlete for himself.
But he also didn’t have it easy, and the thing that separates Yibo from other talented but otherwise unmotivated schlubs like me is that he never once stopped pursuing his creative ambitions with full-time focus and energy, and then he kept doing that, even when acting started to pay off for him more than anything else did. When he had a regular job that required him to film in Hunan several days a week, every week, for four years straight, he found ways to focus on his goals and advance in the industry instead of being tied to the role of variety show host; he took interesting roles and focused on doing what he wanted. As he gained more fame he was able to direct that energy into making his sponsors gladly pay for his experimentations and passions.
His career feels like a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, because it’s frankly extraordinary that millions upon millions of fans are all just throwing our money and our time and our attention at him, hoping he’ll continue to live his best life in whatever way he wants, without any expectation that what he’ll do is what a traditional celebrity would do. In other cases that would never work. An idol who goes for years without ever releasing an album, or who does only one or two three-minute performances a year, tops; or an actor who goes off and does a stint in the wilderness instead of promoting their upcoming film or announcing their newest role; that all might be the kind of thing that causes one’s fandom to wane, one’s clout to drop off.
But Wang Yibo has branded himself so successfully as an all-rounder that it feels like he’s earned not only our permission but our blessing to make all of these other side pursuits and hobbies into his larger career. It’s as if we, his humongous fanbase — and I’m including casual fans, too, those who just admire his work or talent or his overall persona without obsessive stanning — have all collectively said that we’re happy to substitute Yibo’s pure-minded focus on creativity and play and chasing rare activities and opportunities, for our own chances at living that same type of extraordinary life. It doesn’t matter that I, personally, have to make sacrifices or let old dreams die, or set aside one goal in favor of another more practical one, as long as Yibo gets to live his best life, because he’s living it for all of us.
Is that sort of bleak and sort of sad? Yes, I think so. But I also think it’s beautiful, and human, and I think that the way he inspires us amidst the routines of our own lives is the trade-off we get for supporting him through his spontaneous, unpredictable dream life.
