Cantopop star Joey Yung has found herself at the centre of the Hong Kong music spotlight on more than one occasion since starting her career in the mid-'1990s. Born on 16 June 1980 in Tsuen Wan, she cut her teeth as a 15-year-old singer in the Big Echo Karaoke Singing Contest and was subsequently signed by Go East Entertainment Co., Ltd. Her debut single arrived in 1996, "The First Time I Want to be Drunk," but it was with the release of debut EP 1 Joey (EP / JOEY) in 1999 that she began to gain national prominence. The EP broke the record for the most consecutive weeks on the IFPI album chart and featured covers of Jennifer Paige's "Crush" and Céline Dion's "S'il suffisait d'aimer." Joey Yung's star began to ascend rapidly after that, with her first Cantonese studio album Who Will Love Me (2000) eclipsed by the subsequent release of 2001 compilation Love Joey, which became the best-selling album of the year. She put out albums consistently throughout the 2000s, also scoring a Cantopop megahit in 2003's "My Pride," (the title track of her fifth studio album) and picking up numerous awards, including the Most Popular Female Singer award that year. In 2007, she was named among the Top 10 Selling Mandarin Albums of the Year at the 2007 IFPI Hong Kong Album Sales Awards for her LP 小小 (Little Little). She sang a number of official songs for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and marked her tenth anniversary with EEG the following year via the albums A Time For Us and Very Busy. In 2011, she announced her decision to focus on the Mandarin-language market and that year became the first Chinese female singer to perform at London's Royal Albert Hall. Joey & Joey, her 21st studio album, also turned up that year, with the rest of the decade marked out by several tours and further releases like 2018 studio album Searching for Answers (答案之書). She has openly expressed a pro-establishment stance during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong Protests and was featured prominently in a video campaign by the People's Daily to "oppose violence" and "rebuild Hong Kong. 2021 saw the release of the Cantonese studio album Schrodinger's Cat and the Chinese single, "So Fresh" (featuring Dany Lee), that August, along with Cantonese single, "After All These (不配)." A handful of singles arrived in 2022, including "容我Sa嬌 (綜藝《因為是朋友啊》主題曲)," a collaborative single with Charlene Choi and Gillian Chung.
