My wife and I went to a couple of concerts recently, Hebe Tian on 13th December and Stefanie Sun on 20th December. I wasn’t planning on writing about either of them. Concerts are my wife’s passion, not mine, and I don’t really care about music in general anyway. But considering how both concerts were by fairly prominent Chinese female singers, took place at the same venue and in close succession, and yet differed markedly in quality, I felt tempted to write something.
To be fair, I don’t have much experience with concerts so I’m not much of an authority. We also didn’t have great seats so it’s not like we were well positioned to be the best judges. It’s probably also worth noting that ticket prices for Sun’s concert seem to priced slightly higher across the board compared to Tian’s concert. But these caveats in mind, I’d like to put it down for the record that Sun’s concert is so far superior in every conceivable aspect that I think Tian would be embarrassed were she sitting in the audience in Sun’s concert.
It really didn’t take long for us to notice the disparity in quality either. My wife remarked upon sight of the stage setup for the Tian concert about how it felt small and cheap. It was basically empty except for foam structures that were shaped to resemble icebergs. These would go away later of course, but the pattern was consistent in using stage props for Tian to sit down or lie down on. For the Sun concert, decoration was added around the stage to change its shape while leaving the stage itself empty for Sun and her backup dancers. Tian’s concert mostly had no dancers except for one sequence which included three clones of her. The stage for Sun’s concert stayed this way the entire time. This actually made it feel more epic and made you feel like focusing your eyes at the center of the stage.
Tian’s concert actually used more technology. There were lots of tricks with lasers and moments when I was puzzled for a while about how they pulled off illusions like lasers drawing objects in the air in front of her. Sun’s concert used less gee-whiz tech, but it used it more effectively. The use of plain video on the back of the stage, combined with lighting changes and decoration, very effectively conveyed a sense of the entire stage being transported somewhere else. It also made much more creative use of how various parts of the stage could move up and down to allow Sun to appear in unexpected places.
Due to how far we sat from the stage, there was no question of actually being able to make out the faces of the performers. Combined with the relative dullness of the stage for Tian’s concert, I actually spent most of the time looking at the video screens. It didn’t help that Tian wasn’t terribly active onstage. She dressed entirely in very elaborate full-length gowns and basically behaved like an object to be looked at and admired. She did try to interact with the audience but it felt like an insincere, completely rehearsed routine with a script that tried too hard to be polite and politically correct. I found it amusing that she even tried to lampshade how uncertain she felt about what would be appropriate to say but I don’t think this absolves her at all.
The experience with the Sun concert is completely different. I don’t think she has much of a reputation for being a dancer, but that sure didn’t stop her from being very active on stage. Between her hyperactivity, the backup dancers and the impressive stage design, I had zero temptation to stare at the video screen even if I couldn’t make out her face either. She comes across as being far more confident and more at home as a live performer, which seems a bit strange since Tian should have just as much experience from her time with S.H.E. Maybe part of this is because Sun is much more familiar with Malaysian society and she was certainly comfortable enough to jokingly refer to her own sexiness.
Undeniably, Sun also has the advantage of being able to call upon a discography of 10+ years, with all of the emotional attachment that fans have forged with their favorite songs. As she pointed out herself, she is well aware that her songs have featured in the soundtracks of many people’s lives. By contrast, Tian has no call upon the body of work of S.H.E., so her own discography only dates to like two to three years. Amusingly, when she asked the audience what else they’d like her to sing, they asked her to do covers of other singer’s songs.
The upshot here is that we found the Tian concert to be a disappointing experience that wasn’t really worth the money. But the Sun concert was amazing and did a fantastic job at revitalizing our interest in her songs, temporarily at least. I just thought the large disparity to be odd enough to point here, given that these are performers of roughly similar international stature.