Wu was born in
Taipei, Taiwan and is the youngest son in the family. He went to
The Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University (HSNU) and joined the school magazine club as the president and the art editor. He applied to study in the Department of
Chinese Literature of
National Chengchi University (NCCU) in 2000, double-majoring in the Department of Advertising and minoring in the Department of Business Administration and in the Department of Education.
Influences: music Without receiving any formal training, Wu taught himself piano and music theory out of interest. As Wu's elder sister started to learn to play the piano when he was an elementary school student, he used to observe her playing and practiced secretly when no one else was home. Wu enjoyed going to record shops and only listened to classical music, such as the works of
Claude Debussy,
Erik Satie along with several of his favorite composers. When he was in junior high school, he listened to Faye Wong's album
Sky given by his elder sister, and since then, he "has started to listen to all kinds of genres". He talked about it in an interview: "Retrospectively, that was the time when music was truly beautiful...from 1994 to 2000. To me, the songs of those years are the most impressive. It probably has something to do with my adolescence. Many of the songs from that time are even more trendy and edgier than those now".Wu is deeply inspired by the following music artists:
Faye Wong,
A-Mei,
Faith Yang,
Jeff Buckley,
Tori Amos,
Björk,
Ringo Sheena,
Radiohead,
Chyi Yu and
Ai Jing. Wu has often covered the works of the above artists in his performance.
Influences: writing Wu has always been highly sensitive to words. At the age of 3 or 4, he was taught to write Chinese characters by his grandfather. Whenever there were visitors coming, his grandfather would have him recognize words and recite newspaper aloud as a performance. Wu therefore was able to recognize a great number of words at a very young age. When he was an elementary school boy, he even edited a personal dictionary by comparing several dictionaries. When in college, Wu admired contemporary poets
Hsia-Yu (Katie Lee, 夏宇) and
Li Chen (陳黎). Qing-Feng's lyrics style has partially inherited the experimentalism and the
deconstructive method linguistically and syntactically from the two poets. He also mentioned that the foundation of his lyrics writing may have been built along the process of word-recognition and his habit of reading Chinese dictionaries as a child.
Early works Wu first tried to create music when he was in the third year of senior high school after participating in the school music competition Tien-Yun Award (天韻獎). Although he signed up for the competition without having any works ready, he soon wrote his first song
Peeping (窺) and more than a dozen songs were composed one after another in the same month. In the end, he won the championship in the Composition Category with his work
Peeping and another championship in the Solo Singing Category by performing
Tanya Chua's
Ji Nian (紀念, Remember). Wu once mentioned that if he had not won first prize at Tien-Yun Award for Composition Category, he would not have realized that he was able to write songs and might have never thought about writing any other songs. In order to sign up for NCCU Golden Melody (政大金旋獎) in 2001, he started the band Sodagreen with Claire Hsieh, Jyun-Wei Shih and his high school friend Xin-Ge (新哥). By covering
Stefanie Sun's
My Desired Happiness (我要的幸福), he entered the Solo Singing Final and the Composition Final at NCCU Golden Melody Award with his work
Be Late For One Thousand Years (遲到千年). In 2002 Sodagreen participated in NCCU Golden Melody Award again and not only did they win the championship in the Team Category with the work
Audiovisual And Illusion In The Air, but also won three more prizes, including the championship, Best Lyrics and Best Composition in Composition Category with the work
Flying Fish (飛魚). From2001 to 2004, Wu completed more than 100 songs. About half of them became the works for Sodagreen and the rest of the songs were successively used by other artists. == Career ==