What do Jolin Tsai (蔡依林), Big S (real name Barbie Hsu, 徐熙媛), Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝), Fan Bingbing (范冰冰), Fish Leong (梁靜茹), Raymond Lam (林峰), and Angelababy (aka Yang Ying, 楊穎) all have in common? Nips and tucks, ladies and gentlemen, nips and tucks.
Or so claims Taiwanese celebrity makeup artist Ray Chen, according to NOWnews and the United Daily News. Chen made the “revelation” (as if we didn’t all know anyway) last week on a variety show in Thailand, where he declared that he was tired of hearing celebrities tout their makeup artists as the reason why they look so good.
“We aren’t miracle workers,” Chen said.
Photo: Taipei Times
He said that there was nothing wrong with going under the knife, but celebrities should own up to it if they do. And so, what have they done?
Chinese actress Fan has fixed her double eyelids and chin, Big S has a penchant for Botox, and Malaysian singer Leong has had work done on her eyes, nose and chin, the reports said.
Chen criticized Elva Hsiao’s (蕭亞軒) surgeon — or surgeons — for making her look “more horrifying with every surgery,” while Tsai’s doctor(s) came in for praise because she looks “more and more beautiful” with every cut of the knife.
But Chen reserved his tastiest comments for Hong Kong “sex goddess” (性感女神) Angelababy.
“Baby’s the most astounding,” Chen said of the model and actress. “Wherever it’s possible to have work done, she’s done it,” he said.
Cheung came in for special scrutiny as well.
“Her breasts are too perfect,” Chen said. “Usually, women with large breasts have big arms. Her arms are too skinny. The proportion is wrong. She’s either had breast implants, or she’s done upper arm liposuction,” he said.
As if Cheung doesn’t have enough problems. Her marital woes with Nicolas Tse (謝霆鋒) continue to go from bad to worse to, er, worser. It looks as though the divorce that gossip hounds have been predicting since the “airplane incident” (機上事件), which refers to a chance encounter between ex-lover Edison Chen (陳冠希) and Cheung on a flight in May, will come to pass. At least, that is, if fan predictions are correct.
A recent poll revealed that 64 percent of respondents believe the two will divorce, with 57 percent saying they supported Cheung, according to NOWnews.
Chinese Television System (中華電視公司), meanwhile, reported that the Hong Kong glitterati are throwing their support behind Tse, while Taiwan’s celebrities are backing Cheung. Well, not all of them.
Singer, producer, director and actor Jay Chou (周杰倫) defended Tse when asked for a comment. “He’s got a high EQ … If it was me, I wouldn’t be able to stand all the media scrutiny,” Chou said, referring to the scrum of paparazzi who have kept an endless vigil outside Tse’s door over the past month.
And it would seem that Tse still has feelings for Cheung. At a press conference in Beijing earlier this week, a haggard-looking Tse admitted that though there are problems with his marriage, he is standing by Cheung, if only for his two boys.
“It makes me sad when my wife is accused of being bad because it reflects negatively on my children,” he said. “I still love and miss her. But at this point I really don’t know how to carry on.”
Sina.com reported a rumor that Tse served Cheung with divorce papers before she left for a trip to Europe. She returned to Hong Kong on Tuesday, but refused to comment. Stay tuned for updates on the ongoing saga.
And finally, Pop Stop ends this week on a positive note: Web site xinmsn.com reported that Selina Jen (任家萱) of popular band S.H.E will marry sweetheart Richard Chang (張承中) on her Oct. 31 birthday, according to comments made by her father, Jen Ming-ting (任明廷). We wish her the best of luck.
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS