Chinese art students parlay lip synching act into international fame 2006-09-30 01:28:30 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this undated handout picture released by Taihe Rye Music Company, Huang Yixin, right, and Wei Wei attend a news conference in China. (AP Photo)
HONG KONG, Sep. 30 (AP) -- After Yao Ming and Zhang Ziyi, one of China's biggest celebrity exports isn't a towering basketball star or a kung fu fighter. It's two Chinese art students who don NBA jerseys and head gear and lip synch to Backstreet Boys songs.
Thanks to the wide reach of the Internet, Huang Yixin and Wei Wei's goofy homemade cover music videos to songs like "As Long As You Love Me" and "I Want It That Way" have become immensely popular in the West, winning fans from as far as Norway and Lithuania.
On the Web, they're known simply as "Two Chinese boys," as their English fan site is called. But as Wei and Huang told The Associated Press, they were two bored Chinese boys who turned to lip-synching videos for entertainment -- and spawned a pop culture phenomenon.
It all started with the relocation of their alma mater, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, from downtown to the outskirts of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, once known as Canton.
"There wasn't much in the way of facilities or entertainment. Our only connection to the outside world was the Internet and computers. When we have free time outside of classes, we'd play around with this kind of stuff," Wei said in a phone interview.
He said the pair, secondary school friends who ended up both as sculpturing majors and roommates at the Guangzhou arts academy, saw a video of foreigners lip synching to a rock song on the Internet and decided to follow suit. They mouthed along to "As Long As You Love Me" in early March last year and uploaded it onto an internal Web site at their school.
Soon fans uploaded the video onto the Internet and their lives haven't been the same since.
"When we went to the cafeteria for meals, many people gave us weird looks. Later, when we took part in joint school events, people also gave us weird looks," Huang said.
Internet users outside China also took notice.
Their "I Want It That Way" cover has been watched more than 1 million times on the video sharing Web site Youtube.com. On their English fan site, their work has received acclaim from fans from distant places such as Norway, Lithuania, Chile and Argentina.
In a major celebrity nod, U.S. pop star Jessica Simpson posted a link to their cover of her new song "A Public Affair" on her official Web site.
Part of their appeal is the sheer mismatch of two Chinese men wearing basketball jerseys swaying their heads while mouthing the lyrics to English pop songs. Wei and Huang also make for a good physical contrast. The shorter, slender Huang's moves are more subtle while the tall, athletic Wei is more animated.
In their cover of "A Public Affair," while Huang offers a silly smile and holds up his hands like a rabbit, Wei, who wears goggle-like movie star sunglasses and holds his hair up with a blue headband, does the robot dance and performs exaggerated lip movements close to the camera.
Huang described their creative process.
"We hear songs from different sources. We'll pick songs and play them for the other person. If we get the right feeling, we'll keep listening. If we like a song after listening to it for a while, we'll start learning it," he said.
Wei said most of their dance moves are spontaneous.
"We will synchronize our moves during the climaxes of each song, but most of it is improvisational," he said.
They've demonstrated impressive range, tackling both Chinese and English songs. Their English work also includes a cover of the Black Eyed Peas' "Don't Lie." "I think all their songs are fun," Huang said.
Backstreet Boys are a mainstay. That's because the duo are fans. Huang said the group was "super popular" in China in the mid-1990s, so much so that his junior secondary school played its songs on the school's public announcement system every day.
Wei and Huang's extracurricular video making has won them not only international fame, but a career. The pair, who graduated from university recently, signed with the Chinese record company Taihe Rye in February.
Now they're known as "Hou She Nan Sheng," or Back Dorm Boys, a tribute to their beloved U.S. group.
They said they'll continue to make lip-synching videos, but singing with their real voices is a possibility too.
