Cover Here are five fascinating Jackson Yee facts that reveal the quieter side of the star (Photo: IMDB)
Here are five fascinating Jackson Yee facts that reveal the quieter side of the star (Photo: IMDB)
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Jackson Yee has gone from teenage TFBoys sensation to one of China’s most acclaimed young actors. Here are five details that reveal the quieter, stranger and more interesting person behind the fame
C-drama and cinema fans may know Jackson Yee as the quietly magnetic actor from Better Days or Zhang Yimou’s Full River Red. Fashion followers may know him from campaigns for Bottega Veneta, Tiffany & Co and Jaeger-LeCoultre. And for an entire generation in China, he remains one-third of TFBoys, the boy band whose members became household names while they were still teenagers.
All of those things are true. None of them quite explains Jackson Yee.
Born Yi Yangqianxi in 2000, Yee began performing at five and joined TFBoys at 12. He later studied at the Central Academy of Drama and built a filmography that has taken him from Better Days and A Little Red Flower to Nice View, Full River Red and Big World. More interestingly, he has approached the transition from idol to actor without seeming particularly interested in proving that he has escaped his past.
Look closer, and another Jackson Yee emerges: a child performer whose childhood was packed with an almost absurd number of disciplines; a young man who spends his free time making things with his hands; and a celebrity who has used his visibility for causes that have little to do with celebrity.
These are some of the details that make him worth watching even when the cameras aren't rolling.
In case you missed it: 9 Chinese pop stars who became successful C-drama actors
His mother learned Latin dance so she could be his dance partner
Above Before Jackson Yee became a professional performer, his mother was willing to become his dance partner, chauffeur, homework supervisor and, apparently, entire extracurricular department
Yee’s childhood training was anything but casual. His mother enrolled him in an almost comically wide range of activities: Chinese and ethnic dance, modern dance, Latin dance, street dance, magic, calligraphy, gourd flute, accordion, vocal lessons and even face-changing opera.
But one detail says more about his upbringing than that intimidating list ever could.
When Yee began learning Latin dance, his mother enrolled in the class herself for the first three months so she could learn the basic steps and practise with him. She also prepared stacks of calligraphy practice sheets for him, turning what might have been an ordinary childhood lesson into something resembling a second job.
The logistics were just as intense. The family travelled across Beijing for lessons, sometimes spending hours on buses and trains to get to classes. His mother brought food, helped him change and found places where he could do his homework between activities.
It is tempting to look at this in hindsight and call it the making of a prodigy. The reality sounds more exhausting and more ordinary: a child with a lot of interests, and a mother willing to take every one of them seriously.
Now, Yee is a performer with an unusually deep physical vocabulary. By his late teens, he had more than a decade of dance training behind him, moving between styles that ranged from Latin and modern dance to street dance.
You can still see that training in his acting. Yee is rarely a physically loose performer. Even when a character is standing still, there is usually something precise about the way he holds himself—the shoulders, the hands, the direction of a glance. His years as a dancer didn’t disappear when acting became his main profession. They simply became less obvious.
He made a 3.5-metre dragon—and seriously considered becoming an artist
Here is a Jackson Yee fact that tends to disappear beneath the filmography: he can sculpt.
For his 18th birthday in 2018, Yee unveiled a 3.5-metre-tall dragon sculpture called Millennium Dragon (千禧龙). He designed the piece himself and spent months working on it. He had developed a serious interest in sculpture as a teenager and sought out contemporary artist Ren Zhe as a mentor. At one point, he had even considered pursuing fine art formally before choosing acting at the Central Academy of Drama. Now, fans can look to his Instagram, which features several of his raw works.
The dragon had an obvious personal connection. Yee was born in 2000, the Year of the Dragon, and has spoken about the animal's significance to his family. But the more interesting detail is what he chose to do with it: rather than making something small enough to fit on a shelf, he went enormous.
There is something quietly amusing about the image of a teenage pop star spending his time making a giant dragon.
It also offers a useful clue to Yee’s personality. Sculpture is slow. Calligraphy is slow. Both demand repetition, concentration and an acceptance that the finished object may take considerably longer than the attention span of the person watching you make it.
That sensibility turns up elsewhere in Yee’s work. His performances tend to resist the instinct to explain everything. He is often most effective when he is doing less: watching someone, absorbing a piece of information, allowing a reaction to register rather than announcing it.
‘Better Days’ changed what audiences thought Jackson Yee could be
Above His first major film role arrived while much of the public still knew him primarily as a teenage pop star
When director Derek Tsang cast Yee in Better Days, Yee already had something many young actors would spend decades trying to acquire: an enormous audience. The problem was that the audience already thought it knew him.
Then came Xiao Bei.
In the 2019 film, Yee plays a streetwise young man who becomes the protector of Zhou Dongyu’s bullied high-school student. The film became a major commercial and critical success, was selected as Hong Kong’s submission for the Academy Awards and won eight Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress and Best New Performer for Yee.
The performance was striking partly because it didn’t try to erase the person audiences already knew. Yee didn’t arrive onscreen pretending he had never been a pop idol. He gave them something else to look at.
After Better Days, his choices became increasingly varied. He played a young man confronting cancer in A Little Red Flower, an ambitious older brother in Nice View, a soldier caught up in political intrigue in Zhang Yimou’s Full River Red and Liu Chunhe, a young man with cerebral palsy, in Big World.
The pattern is more interesting than any individual role. Yee hasn’t spent his career frantically demonstrating that he can be “serious”. He has kept taking roles that require him to be something different from the last thing audiences saw.
That is how the category changed.
First, he was a TFBoys member who acted. Then he was an idol who could act. Then he became a young actor whose earlier pop career was simply part of the biography.
In 2025, his performance in Big World earned him the Golden Rooster Award for Best Actor, making him the youngest winner of the category. By then, the old distinction had begun to feel almost beside the point.
See more: 5 Things To Know About Derek Tsang And His Oscar-Nominated Film, "Better Days"
His philanthropic work began before his acting career had even taken off
Celebrity philanthropy can sometimes feel like a footnote attached to a much more interesting career. Yee’s is worth looking at because it began so early.
In 2017, for his 17th birthday, he established the Jackson Yee Fund under the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation. Its initial fundraising supported programmes for “left-behind” children in rural China—young people whose parents had migrated to cities for work.
From there, his public causes expanded.
Yee has worked with the World Health Organisation on tobacco-control and adolescent-health campaigns, participated as a youth representative at the UN Economic and Social Council Youth Forum and supported cultural-heritage and environmental initiatives. He was appointed a Great Wall Protection and Public Welfare Ambassador in 2017, and in 2024 became an Olympic Friend in China, a role connected to promoting Olympic values and the Paris Games.
None of those titles tells us very much on its own. Taken together, though, they suggest a particular use of celebrity: not simply appearing at a charity event, but lending the enormous machinery around his name to causes involving children, public health, heritage and the environment.
And there is something notable about the timing. Yee began doing this while he was still a teenager himself.
One of his directors was surprised by how quiet he was—and then wrote him a letter
Above The Jackson Yee who can command an arena is apparently a very different presence on a film set
Joan Chen discovered this firsthand.
Chen directed Yee in her segment of the anthology film Her Story (世间有她), and at a Beijing International Film Festival masterclass she recalled being initially uncertain about casting someone so young and so closely associated with idol culture.
What changed her mind was watching him work.
Chen praised his ability to move between emotional intensity and restraint, describing something unusually natural in his screen presence. But she also remembered another quality: he was extremely quiet.
According to Chen, she did not have many opportunities to speak casually with him before filming, so she wrote him a detailed letter about the character’s internal life and recommended documentaries for him to watch.
It is a small anecdote, but it feels strangely revealing.
Yee has spent most of his life in circumstances designed to make a person visible: television stages, concerts, magazine covers, brand campaigns, film premieres. Yet the stories that recur around his work often describe the opposite behaviour—watching, listening, studying, making notes, learning a physical skill, working on a sculpture.
He became famous very young, at an age when most people are still experimenting with versions of themselves in private.
Jackson Yee has had very little privacy in which to do that experimenting.
Perhaps what makes his career so interesting is that he seems to have found another way: make things, learn things, keep working and let the work change the picture of you.
Sasha Lim Uy Mariposa is a lifestyle journalist who is known for her food writing. Based in Manila and currently a marketing content specialist, she still dabbles in entertainment, beauty and dining coverage. She was the former managing editor of Esquire Philippines and was the food editor at SPOT.ph. She also edited several best-selling books about food.
She now writes for the different Tatler Asia markets as a contributing writer for T-Labs.
