Rainie Yang Cheng-Lin 楊丞琳
Many of the songs Rainie Yang performs in concert were first heard by audiences in Taiwanese dramas. "Ambiguity," one of her best-known songs, played over the closing credits of Devil Beside You, in which Yang played a lovestruck student. In Spider Lilies she played a girl who makes a living performing in front of a webcam and falls in love with a tattoo artist, while in The Tag-Along 2 she played a social worker searching for a missing daughter and turning to the girl's boyfriend for help.
Rainie Yang was born on June 4, 1984, in Taipei. According to her, both of her parents were from Guangdong. Rainie has spoken Cantonese since childhood and considers the language a part of her life. Her parents divorced when Rainie was a teenager. She and her older sister stayed with their mother. Yang says her mother stood surety for the girls' father, and after his business failures the debts fell to her. In her first years of work, Yang recalls, she gave her mother all her earnings and lived on the pocket money her mother allotted her. She had all but stopped seeing her father and learned of his death in 2013, before a concert in Shanghai. Later, in an interview with Taiwanese television, Yang admitted that she regretted never once inviting him to one of her performances.
In middle school Yang studied in the dance class, then entered the drama department of Huagang Arts School. From the age of thirteen she took part in television contests and went to auditions. In 1999 she passed a selection, and in 2000, at sixteen, she made her debut in the girl group 4 in Love. BMG first presented the members as computer-game heroines, and at the presentation of their debut album in 2000 showed the singers themselves. All four were given English names after different weather phenomena. Thus Yang Cheng-Lin became Rainie, and when the group broke up after two albums, the name stayed. According to Yang, she dropped out of school for the sake of work. In an archival reference from Taiwan's Central News Agency she is listed as a school graduate. Even then Yang was appearing in Meteor Garden (2001), where she played Xiaoyou, the heroine's friend. That same year saw the release of the Hong Kong Merry-Go-Round (2001), her first feature film.
After the group broke up, Yang hosted Guess Show for several years. One broadcast was held against her for a long time. In 2003 she was asked how long the war between China and Japan had lasted. When she was prompted with the answer, according to Taiwan's TVBS, she asked in surprise whether it had really been only eight years. In 2006 Yang apologized to journalists in Shanghai, and in April 2007 she apologized again at a press conference in Beijing. She explained that she had known history poorly and had thought the war lasted longer. According to Sina Music, her agency showed journalists a recording of the program and separately refuted a rumor then circulating that Yang had insulted her critics from mainland China in Singapore.
In 2005, in the series Devil Beside You, Yang played the student Qi Yue, whose love letter mistakenly reaches the university bully. For the series she recorded a song about how hard it is to tell where friendship ends and love begins. "Ambiguity" (曖昧) gave its name to her first solo album. Yang recalled that this was the song she spent the longest recording, and when it became a hit she wept with joy. For Why Why Love (2007) she was first nominated for a Golden Bell, and she won the award for best actress in 2010 for the series Hi My Sweetheart (2009). Opposite Show Lo she played Chen Bao Zhu, a girl with a bully's reputation who, years later, already working in radio, still hides her vulnerability behind sharpness.
Yang appeared in films far less often. In Spider Lilies (2007), Zero Chou cast her as Jade, who earns money performing in front of a webcam and comes to a tattoo parlor to see a girl she has known since childhood. The tattoo artist was played by Isabella Leung. The HKCinema reviewer especially singled out the scenes in which the actresses are left alone with the camera. The film won the Teddy Award at the Berlinale, and "Little Jasmine" (小茉莉), performed by Yang, was nominated for a Golden Horse in the Best Original Film Song category. Yang's next leading role in Hong Kong cinema, in the Thailand-shot horror Child's Eye (2010), disappointed the same reviewer.
After several years devoted mainly to music, Yang returned to a leading role in a Taiwanese drama — in Life Plan A and B (2016). Her character, Zheng Ruwei, may get a promotion and move to work in Shanghai. The series shows how her life unfolds in both cases. In one, she leaves for Shanghai; in the other, she stays in Taiwan to help her boyfriend's family. In an interview, Yang compared this fork in the road to her own long-ago choice between school and work. The role brought her another Golden Bell nomination. The following year, Yang played social worker Li Shufen in The Tag-Along 2 (2017). At the director's request, Yang wrote a biography of Shufen and asked an acquaintance from social services to read the character's lines to her. She wanted to capture the calm, even tone in which the woman was used to speaking to those in her care. The film took in more than one hundred million Taiwanese dollars, and in The Tag-Along: The Devil Fish (2018), Yang played Shufen again in a post-credits scene.
Yang worked with Zero Chou again on the television film Three Makes A Whole (2019). She played Taiwanese director Liu Lili, who lived for decades under one roof with the man she loved and his wife. Yang played her both young and very old. She recalled that, working on the voice, she could rely on just two lines from a recording in which Liu was scolding someone on set. In Kidnapped Soul (2021), she again played the mother of a missing girl and, by her own account, carried a photograph of her screen daughter so as to get used to her. At the film's presentation, Yang admitted that she enjoys acting even more than singing.
Yang called her schoolmate Alien Huang her first love. After they broke up, they avoided each other for a while, then began talking again, and in 2018 Yang invited him to sing with her in Kaohsiung. Two years later, Huang died suddenly, and Yang performed at his memorial concert. She also worked with her future husband, musician Li Rong-Hao. He wrote "The Audience" (觀眾) for her, and in 2017 at his concert in Taipei they sang a duet, and Li kissed her on the cheek in front of the whole hall. On September 17, 2019, they registered their marriage in Hefei. They held their wedding on February 18, 2024, and Yang posted a photograph from the ceremony exactly a year later. In a conversation with United Daily News, she explained that she and her husband are used to keeping their personal lives to themselves.
In 2022, on a program on mainland television, Yang recalled that as a child her family could not afford seafood, and said that she grew up in Taipei but considers herself Cantonese by origin. On social media, her words about family expenses spread as if she had been talking about all Taiwanese. Yang turned off comments on Facebook and Instagram and at the time did not respond publicly to the controversy. A year later, at a concert in Zhengzhou, trying to find out who in the hall had kissed during her song, she joked that the people of Henan had a reputation for being fond of fibbing. The next day, Yang called the joke hurtful and impolite and apologized, and local authorities summoned the concert organizers for an explanation.
The Like a Star tour, which began in 2020 to mark the twentieth anniversary of her career, wrapped up in June 2025 in Chongqing. At a Taipei concert in 2023, she brought 4 in Love back together on stage. In September 2025, exactly twenty years after the release of her first solo record, she put out a new release, Ambiguity, and in October the digital version of her album Only in Echoes (有且) arrived. Yang opened her next tour, Elephant in the Room (房間裡的大象), on New Year's Eve in Nanchang, and in March 2026 she performed the show in Suzhou.
