YUQI '27' Album Review: Self-Written Chinese Mini Album
Twenty-seven is the age, according to the album's own description, when "the brightest smiles often hide the deepest worries." YUQI is releasing a record about that behind a rollout built from a cinematic intro film, paired black-and-white and color portraits and a character pop-up. The tension between confession and presentation is the interesting thing about "27," out today from Cube Entertainment, and it is the thing this review can judge.
A note on method. This review is written from the album's official materials, the released "I Like You" video and published interviews, not from a full listen to all six tracks. It does not rate or describe the sound of individual songs, and it grades the record's strategy and the evidence around it instead.
"27" is YUQI's second solo mini album, released at 1 p.m. KST on Oct. 8. All six tracks were written and composed by YUQI, and the project is in Chinese, according to the Korea Times. The title track "Stay" mixes Chinese and English, and the sunflower is the central image: a bloom that keeps turning toward the sun while its shadow trails behind. It follows the single "Motivation" from September 2025 and her April 2024 debut EP "YUQ1," which reached No. 2 on the Circle Album Chart.
The strongest decision is the language. For a member of a Korean group, a Chinese-only record is the most commercially legible move available, and the evidence is already there. The pre-release "I Like You" topped YouTube's daily trending music videos in Singapore and Hong Kong and charted in more than six countries, including Canada and Australia. Star News Korea reported that YUQI was named Tencent Music Chart's Woman of the Year for 2026, and that the Guangzhou date of her China fan-con sold all 10,000 seats on the day tickets opened, Sept. 30. The cost is a language wall around Korean radio and charts, and the bilingual title track is the bridge across it.
What doesn't work, or at least what carries risk, is the gap between pitch and packaging. The pitch is vulnerability. The packaging is curated down to the frame: an intro film narrated in Chinese, which tells the listener "You were never a naturally brave person," and concept photos shot in two matching tones. Self-exposure that arrives this composed reads as aesthetic before it reads as confession. YUQI sets the bar herself, saying she tried genres she had never shown before and that parts "felt a bit raw or unpolished" at times. That promise cuts both ways. If the production is too clean, the concept collapses, and if it is rough for its own sake, it fails the pop audience that "I Like You" reached.
The English lines in "Stay" carry a smaller version of the same risk. Putting them inside a Chinese-language title track widens the audience and also hedges between two of them. That is a judgment the full album will settle, and it is the one this review does not make.
"27" is out now via Cube Entertainment. YUQI's "2026 YUQI Fan-Con '27'" opens Oct. 11 at the Baoneng Guangzhou International Sports Arena and continues to Chengdu, Beijing and Shanghai.
