The late Chinese-American singer-songwriter, dancer, producer and actress Ferren Lee, known professionally as CoCo Lee, was born in Hong Kong on January 17 1975, to an Indonesian Chinese father and a Hongkongese Cantonese mother. At the age of 9, she relocated to San Francisco with her family and was offered a recording contract in Hong Kong after graduating from high school in 1992. Putting down initial roots as a singer based in Hong Kong, she made her debut on several compilation albums, including Red Hot Hits '93 Autumn Edition (火熱動感93勁秋版), and in 1994 released her first two Mandarin studio albums, Love From Now On (愛就要趁現在) and Promise Me (答應我), both on Fancy Pie Records. In 1996, CoCo Lee signed a contract with Sony Music Entertainment and released her best-selling self-titled album. In 1998 she became famous for voicing Mulan in the Mandarin version of the Disney film of the same name and 1999 saw the release of her first English-language album, the pop and R&B-adjacent Just No Other Way, which featured the popular single "Do You Want My Love." In 2001, she became the first and only artist of Chinese ethnicity to perform at the Oscars; she performed the Best Original Song nominated, "A Love Before Time" from the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Her follow-up album, Exposed, surfaced in 2005. The Mandarin/English album Illuminate (盛開) was released in 2013 she won the fourth season of the hit Chinese singing competition I Am a Singer in 2016. A digital Mandarin single, "18" came out in 2017 and in 2019 she embarked on tours in China, Taiwan, and the US. A new single, "战歌," was released in May 2023. On 2 July 2023, Coco Lee attempted suicide and was admitted to Hong Kong's Queen Mary Hospital in an unconscious state. She died there three days later, on 5 July 2023, at the age of 48.
