Famed Japanese modern female photographer and director Ninagawa Mika is collaborating with Vogue Taiwan for all of 2013, producing one photo spread a month titled “12 Women”. I enjoy Ninagawa Mika’s works, which have a distinctive quality of being extremely colorful and saturated, with an emphasis on goldfish and flowers. She’s a longtime contributor to Vogue Taiwan, having once done a super high profile shoot photographing Taiwan’s most famous actresses and models in 2010 for the International Flora Exposition held in Taipei that year. January featured Taiwanese socialite Aimee Sun, February came rising model-actress Amber An, but it’s the March edition with Nikki Hsieh that finally got my attention. Much as I love Chris Wu, he probably wouldn’t be enough for me to check out King Flower alone. It was him together with Nikki, who seriously blew me away with her performance in Die Sterntaler with Rhydian Vaugn, that made me think KF at least be worth the watch for their acting alone. All that great chemistry between them is just icing on the cake. Nikki is already a movie awards veteran, having bagged the Best Support Actress Golden Horse and Best Actress at the Taipei Film Festival, so KF is really a cake walk for her. She’s a very edgy girl in real life, with multiple tattoos (a full lower back tat, one along her side torso, a few on her arms) and multiple piercings including a tongue ring, so watching her play ladylike Liang Yen and bumpkin-ish Da Hua is pretty entertaining. I really love this collaboration photo spread so check it out for some neat eye candy. This spread is titled “The girl who falls in love with a goldfish”.
Nikki Hsieh for Mika Ninagawa Vogue March 2013:
This entire time I have been surfing the internet finding a live streaming for King Flower. EPISODE 16 IS COMING!!! oh gosh.
But these pictures make it up. Nikki is beautiful. And it’s crazy that she has so many tattoos! that’s really daring.
COMPLETELY AGREE. I only started watching KF because of Nikki (had to give up because too much James Wen and his incompetent character drove me away). Her performance in Die Sterntaler was absolutely amazing, I completely fell in love with her and real/fluid her acting (as well as ability to use ASL) was. Can’t say I loved Rhydian, but ahh this girl, want to see more of her in dramas!
Woah surprised to hear that Nikki is so edgy in real life since in both DS and KF, she plays such pure, innocent characters. How does she hide all her tattoos, like the ones on her arms, though in the dramas?
Make-up maybe?
I love the fact she’s got tattoos. I haven’t got any and don’t really want any either, but Asian entertainment industry sometimes seems so normative in the way people are supposed to look and behave that I just love that’s she’s not afraid to do her thing.
I’m laughing at how only the tattoo on her foot makes it into the photos though you can see a few others in the video