Izumi Liu Yu-Qi 刘羽琦
In Hong Kong, Izumi Liu Yu-Qi is remembered for her role as Siri in the comedy Lan Kwai Fong 2. Siri is a married woman who embarks on an affair with a stranger after he mistakenly picks up her phone. At the time, Hong Kong newspapers still presented Liu primarily as a model from the mainland, even though she had already recorded a single, appeared in a Tsui Hark film, and played the bodyguard of the first provisional president of the Republic of China. Liu hoped to continue working in Hong Kong, but ultimately ended up acting mainly in mainland TV series.
Liu Yuqi was born in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province. HKCinema lists her date of birth as 18 July 1986. According to another version, cited by the Hong Kong newspaper The Sun and the ChineseMov reference site, she was born on 18 July 1987. Little is known about her family. As a child, Liu took up table tennis and, according to Sina, played it for ten years. At fifteen she moved to Beijing alone, where she began working as a model.
Her first big success came in May 2006 at a modelling contest that the Sina portal organised for the FIFA World Cup. Liu passed the selection round in Nanjing and performed as a fan of the Italian national team. In the Beijing final, eight contestants guessed football stars, voiced excerpts from films and sang. Liu won, and in September she received a photogenic award at the Chinese final of the Miss International contest. Her photos spread widely across the Chinese internet, and newspapers dubbed her "the first beauty of the web". Taiwanese music producer Ji Zhongping took on the task of helping her with a singing career. Liu recorded "A Sicilian Story" (西西里往事), and in spring 2007, according to Sohu, she was preparing her first album.
Around the same time she began acting. In the sci-fi TV comedy Angel (2007) she got the role of a forgotten doll, and in All About Women (2008) by Tsui Hark she appeared in a small cameo. At the same time a legal dispute was under way with the Beijing agency "Inkai", with which Liu had signed a six-year contract in the summer of 2006. Under the contract, only the agency could arrange her shoots and performances, and breach of its terms carried a penalty of five million yuan. The agency went to court when Liu became an exclusive model for a magazine and began shooting for it. The agency claimed it had already invested money in advertising and recording Liu's songs, and that she had not cleared the shoots with them. The Beijing court awarded the agency four million yuan. In December 2008 an appellate court upheld the ruling.
In September 2009 a court restricted Liu from leaving China, and on 9 November she was stopped at passport control at Beijing airport and taken to court. Liu's mother came from Xuzhou and that same day paid 197,000 yuan. An instalment plan was agreed with the agency, after which the court lifted the restriction. In December, in an interview with Beijing television, Liu said that the lessons promised by the agency had stopped after a month, and soon the payments stopped too. According to her, after the company moved to the Daxing district she lived in a room of five square metres with no heating in winter, and was given three hundred yuan for travel to magazine shoots. Liu said she had agreed to pay so that she could keep working.
In 2011 Liu moved to the company Hairun. Her first film work after the move was Summer Love, a comedy about three hapless tourists who meet girls on the beach. Liu said she was immediately drawn to the role of Qi Qi, who is used to measuring everything in money. According to her, she had never had a role like that before. That same year saw the release of Sun Yat-Sen, made for the centenary of the Xinhai Revolution. Liu played the revolutionary Yin Weijun, who in the film serves as the president's bodyguard. At the premiere she admitted she was nervous about the historical role, even though she had few scenes.
A year later, the director of Summer Love cast Liu again, this time in the comedy Lan Kwai Fong 2. One of the film's four love stories is about Siri and Don, a regular on the nightclub scene. Their explicit scene in a park in central Hong Kong was discussed in the press before the premiere. The film took about eleven million Hong Kong dollars at the local box office. At a press meeting marking its success, Liu said she would like to work in Hong Kong again and hoped audiences would judge her by her roles.
Even before the film's release, in July 2012, Hong Kong's Oriental Daily wrote about Liu's alleged romance with actor and singer Raymond Lam Fung. The paper reported that they had met in autumn 2011 at a birthday party in Beijing, and that at the end of the year Liu supposedly travelled to Xiamen to see him for Christmas and met his parents. Raymond Lam Fung said through his manager that they barely knew each other and declined further comment. Liu told reporters that they had met at his home and that she had kept his messages. She did not show them to journalists. A few days later she said she was deleting offensive comments from her microblog.
By that time Liu had already appeared in mainland horror films as well. Her first work in the genre was Midnight Microblog (2013), which began shooting in autumn 2011 in Harbin. Liu played the younger sister of a journalist who is injured during an outing to an abandoned factory. In Cold Pupil (2013) she was given the role of a ghost. That same year Tencent Video released Beau-Care Clinic, one of the platform's first scripted series. Liu played Zheng Kailin, a sharp-tongued surgeon whom people come to in the hope of changing their appearance and, along the way, sorting out their lives. One of her patients, for instance, is a model who wants to look like the late wife of the man she is in love with. In one of her early Sohu interviews Liu said she condemned actresses who had achieved fame through plastic surgery.
At the turn of 2014 and 2015 Liu appeared on the Chinese version of Dancing with the Stars. During the show's filming she returned to her school in Xuzhou and played table tennis again. She won two elimination bouts and stayed in the show until January. For her final performance Liu chose a rumba to the song If You Heard It Too, explaining her choice by saying that she was used to hearing all sorts of things said about herself. In 2015 she played the martial arts enthusiast Ye Wenzhou in Ultimate Teacher, and a couple of years later she landed the lead role in the web comedy Da Song Fei Wen Lu. Her character, Pan Xiaoxiao, is transported from modern China to the Song dynasty, where she is mistaken for Pan Jinlian.
From the second half of the 2010s Liu appeared in series more and more often. In the costume drama Legend Of Fu Yao (2018) she played Hong Ying, and in the adventure series Chong Qi Zhi Ji Hai Ting Lei (2020) she played San Ye and A Ning. In the detective series Babel (2022) her character, Yi Bing, poses for a photographer shortly before her death, and that photo shoot becomes a lead in the investigation. In July 2026, iQIYI released the detective series Purple Mist (春日之地), in which Liu played the popular blogger Zhu Xiaoyu. She is approached during the investigation into the death of a student and the accident that befell his classmate. In the premiere announcement the actress was introduced as Liu Yuyu (Liu Yuqi), while in the platform's own cast list she appears under the name Liu Yuqi.
