Mark Mi Words

We meet MARK CHAO and YANG MI, the faces of H&M’s Chinese New Year campaign, in Beijing to experience their sizzling chemistry first-hand.

- Jonathan Fam

We’re in Beijing on this cool September morning to meet Taiwanese actor Mark Chao and Chinese actress Yang Mi, who are fronting H&M’s Chinese New Year campaign. The pair came out tops in a China-wide poll where fans were asked to vote for the couple they most want to see in the Swedish fashion giant’s 2018 CNY campaign. In case you didn’t know, Mark and Yang Mi are not a couple in real life — his wife is Chinese screen goddess Gao Yuan Yuan while Yang Mi is married to Hongkong star Hawick Lau.

They’ve got hit Chinese drama Eternal Love to thank for their popularity as a duo. Sure, Mark and Yang Mi are major stars in their own right but their roles as star-crossed lovers in that centuries-spanning fantasy romance epic propelled them to Jack & Rose, Carrie & Big-levels, not just in China, but anywhere in the world where there are Chinese people with access to cable TV or wifi. AKA everywhere. P/S: Eternal Love has over 35 billion views online making it one of the most popular Chinese dramas ever.

We’re now seated with five other journos from Taiwan, Hongkong, Malaysia and China in a makeshift interview room in a film studio some 20 minutes from the heart of Beijing. Around the corner from where we are is where Mark and Yang Mi, who we’ve just been informed are arriving soon, will be shooting some of the images for the campaign. The pair are the newest superstars to lend their mugs to H&M’s Lunar New Year collection, which is out in stores now. Fronting last year’s campaign was Fan Bingbing and her husband Li Chen. Before them was Super Junior heartthrob Siwon and supermodel Liu Wen. And before them was Zhou Xun and her hubby, CSI star Archie Kao.