BeatRoute Magazine ON Edition - January 2020

After leaving f(x) and emerging as a solo artist from the S.M.
Entertainment K-Pop factory, Amber Liu is reborn By CONNOR GAREL
A
mber Liu
doesn’t want
to be perfect
anymore. It’s
not that she
believes she
already is, but
rather that her deepest instincts, forged amid
an aborted childhood, betray a profound
desire to be unerring. It’s an ascetic, monastic
kind of itch, the sort of crippling force majeure
that would make any surgeon or ballerina,
in spite of other compromising
qualities, excel at their jobs. Liu
AMBER LIU
wants to be impressive. She wants Thursday, Jan. 23
to be precise.
Vogue Theatre (Vancouver)
Such desires inevitably fail to Tix: $24.99, eventbrite.ca
cloak themselves. “My choreographer
yells at me a lot,” she tells me over
the phone, laughing, one long early morning
in November. “I’m always calculating myself
in the mirror. I’ll just stop the routine if I don’t
extend my arm at, like, an exact 45-degree
angle. It’s stupid.” In other words: anything
that isn’t perfect must be done again,
repeated until emptied of all that
might be construed as unpolished. The
enemy, forever lingering behind each
target, is mediocrity.
“It probably has to do with me starting
out so young,” she says. “I never
really got a chance to grow up, or to
explore who I was.”
Call it armchair psychology, or call it
a self-diagnosis, but in either case, the
assessment tracks. Liu was barely 15 when
she was enrolled into the years-long training
system that would spit her out, fully formed,
on the other side of f(x), the five-member
South Korean girl group that would become
one of the most internationally recognized
K-pop acts of all time. At 15, she was a nerdy,
inchoate teenager from California, nursing a
quiet interest in biology and chemistry. Then
she blinked, and she was someone very, very
different.
“Those teenage years are when you’re
really figuring yourself out, and I was already
thrown into a world where I’d be in front of
millions of people,” Liu explains. “And those
people were going to be judging me.”
This intense judgment is, ostensibly, what
the K-pop factory system anticipates. The
hope is that, through long days and rigorous
training, all flaws will be systematically eliminated,
and the artist will adopt a congenital
allergy to mistakes.
In September of this year, Liu officially
announced that she had not renewed her
contract with S.M. Entertainment and became
the first member of f(x) to begin a solo career.
She’d already released a couple of stray singles
after signing with Steel Wool Entertainment
in 2018, but transitioning into a full-time
solo artist marked a definite, promising
rebirth. It’s almost as though she’s returning to
the exact moment when she lost the chance
to explore who she was, just to correct it.
“I’m ready to have fun now,” she says. Liu
still remembers f(x) fondly, but she now realizes
that none of the money or fame it granted
satisfied her, never made her any happier. “I’m
going to escape rooms now. I’m geeking out
with my friends on anime. I’m playing video
games. Work can become just work, and I’m
trying to learn how to have fun with it.”
This isn’t hard to believe. It’s right there in
the music, which seems buoyed by the spirit
of someone who has not yet decided where
or how to set up camp. If you listen to Liu’s
latest three songs, for example — “Ready For
The Ride,” a smoldering slow jam; “Numb,” a
sparse piano ballad; and “Curiosity,”
a mellow, radio-friendly dance
tune — you’ll hear the ambient
noise of someone fiddling intently
with a pile of puzzle pieces,
as though trying every possible
combination to figure out which works best.
“I think that, after being in a certain type
of system for so long, human nature is to do
something different — hopefully,” Liu says.
“I know now that I don’t have to kill myself
over being perfect anymore. I don’t think I fit
the criteria of a K-pop idol as of now, but it’s
always going to be a part of me.”
That doesn’t mean she’s shedding all of
her K-pop inclinations. In her music videos,
Liu is still drawn to elaborate, precise
choreography. Her upcoming EP, X, will have
accompanying music videos for all six songs.
Liu is also preparing to embark on a major
2020 U.S. tour, one that will take her to 24
cities and become the longest North American
tour any K-pop artist has ever done.
I ask, already anticipating the answer,
whether this moment feels more like home
to her. “Yes,” she replies, eagerly, then
describes what seems like a return to the
locus of what governs her devotion to music:
how it connects people in varying degrees of
intimacy; how it illuminates inner truths, like
a hyperactive firefly in a dark cavern; how it
forces a position of honesty and vulnerability,
all off of “a bunch of sounds.”
“Everyone that I’m working now with has
really allowed me to be more vulnerable and
open up, and has taught me that it’s okay
to express my emotions,” Liu says. I mean
to ask what the alternative is, but then she
compares her manager to her dad, and before
I can chalk it up to a Freudian slip — like
when you accidentally call your third grade
homeroom teacher “Mom” — she starts to
say he isn’t unlike “a big brother, or maybe an
uncle,” then describes her team as an extension
of herself: a sort of intimate, surrogate
familial unit.
It’s this sense of closeness and grounding,
perhaps, that is helping Liu to come into her
own — to relinquish her desire for control
and to trust that her instincts will catch her.
It will be a long process, as all births are. “I
don’t want to be afraid anymore,” she says.
“Even with making mistakes.” Later, I make
note of how many times she has used the
word “mistake” over the last 40 minutes of
our conversation. I write it down: eight times.
“Perfect” comes up six. Nature, it would
seem, is the most difficult trap to elude. ,
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JANUARY 2020 BEATROUTE 13