It’s also a profound crime, because Yellow’s shape-shifting sonic approach marks him out as among the region’s freshest talents, touting a smart, slick, genre-blurring approach to pop that would snugly slide onto playlists next to Moses Sumney or Frank Ocean.

Whatever his talents, Yellow’s visibility can’t be helped, I point out, by his English stage name. A touching play on his high school nickname it may be – but Google “Yellow music” or “Yellow songs” and you won’t find a trace of the artist born Huang Xuan.

Huang, 30, was born into an indigenous family of musicians – his mother is a gospel singer and his sister plays the marimba and works on film scores. Surrounded by music, he showed early songwriting flair, writing his first song at 13, about a girl. A girl that got away? “No!” he declares with unabashed pride. “No girls rejected me, but we stayed together only three months, and I wrote a song about her.” Was it ever released? “No, absolutely no, nooooo.”

That song never saw the light of day – and neither did dozens more tracks he crafted in his teenage years (he’s lost count of his own diary scraps). After winning a nationwide talent contest at the age of 17, Huang was signed by Sony, but the executives held zero interest in his original material, instead preferring to package just another plastic idol.

“They said, ‘The songs you write do not fit you.’ They wanted to put me in some box – but that’s not me,” he remembers over a decade later, with the vividness of one still nursing an open wound. “And at that moment I decided to only play what I truly love and cherish. There was a big passion in that moment, it changed me.”

Still under contract, Huang started releasing music online under a number of pseudonyms – including Yellow Freak – simultaneously serving as writer, producer and vocalist. The sleeker Yellow 黃宣 moniker was introduced with a pair of sultry, soulful EPs Urban Disease (2018) and Circus Fever (2019), tracks from which were collected on debut long player Yellow Fiction (2020). But it was a year later when Huang’s true talents were made clear as he cast aside those retro R&B stylings to realise his true artistic vision on 2021’s singular self portrait, Beanstalk.

“For me, Beanstalk is something from my soul – it’s my self-identity, self-searching, my life’s journey. I don’t know where it will take me, but sometimes you just have to enjoy the journey, and that is my life philosophy,” he explains. “That album was a process of finding myself, knowing myself – I didn’t know what I would find in the end, but I kept searching by making music – I’m Jack and this is my Beanstalk.”

In eight snappy tracks, Beanstalk jerks the listener through a restless audio voyage, marrying chilled, bucolic electro soundscapes and smart urban beats with dashes of jazz, soul, folk and vaudeville, of saucy funk and swamp blues, all serving the skyward journey of Huang’s inner fairy tale.

“I consider myself as Jack, because Jack doesn’t care what other people think of him, and at the end of the day, Jack finds out that what’s more important and more valuable is the process – not the outcome, the process in and of itself. It’s kind of like self-therapy. It’s just 20 minutes long, but in those 20 minutes – wow, it’s like a universe.

“Before this album, I never treated my music as a self-dialogue – this is the first time I ever wanted to have that conversation with myself. This process feels very unique for me and maybe I can’t ever recreate this kind of journey.”

“What happened that night? I still don’t know,” he raves. “It was ridiculous, an illusion – it’s not true.

“The absurd thing is I’ve been trying to create music my whole life, in order to prove myself, but what made me seen and made me famous is being the host – this is the most absurd and funny thing in my life. I don’t consider myself as a good host, I just showed up and talked … that’s it.”

Soon all of Taiwan’s glossy magazines were queuing up for long profile interviews – and accompanying photo shoots, thrusting his idiosyncratic approach to fashion under the spotlight. “After that, I got a lot of different offers and invitations outside of music, to be involved in a film, but in music [my career] hasn’t changed a lot.”

While Huang remains nonchalant about his clearly carefully curated look, he is quick to shout out his brothers at Taiwanese brand Namesake, a self-described “home for the next gener-actions”. “I never really choose what I wear, it’s more important how I feel,” he insists. “There needs to be some emotions that will fill these looks with different meanings and vibes – that’s my approach to fashion.”

What’s clear from both his music and words alike is that Huang remains a deeply grounded but completely focused creative spirit. After all the changes his life has undergone in the past year, he takes solace in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Daoism while remaining level-headed about his own giddy dreams world domination.

“I never want to pigeon-hole myself or bind myself in anything when it comes to music, because I enjoy the journey of discovery,” he reasons. “I will never know where I end up, and that’s part of it. I studied Daoism and believe you will be where you will be. My one motto for life and music is never lose the passion. Maybe my music will be a hit in Iceland one day, or Finland? I don’t know – maybe someday, you can’t tell anything definite.”