The boy learned to dance before he learned to read sheet music. His mother was obsessed with Michael Jackson, so in their home in Changsha, a city in China's Hunan province, she taught her only son to sing, play instruments, and move like the King of Pop. That boy was Lay Zhang, the Chinese singer and dancer who would one day stand on a stage in Los Angeles as the only Chinese artist invited to the Grammy Awards. But long before that, he was just a kid from a family of teachers, chasing a sound his mother loved. Lay Zhang was born on October 7, 1991.
From Changsha to Seoul
How did a teenager from Changsha end up reshaping what a Chinese pop star could achieve? The answer starts with a risky choice. When he was sixteen, Lay Zhang passed a global audition held by SM Entertainment, the South Korean company behind some of Asia's biggest idol groups, and moved to Seoul to train. Four years later, in the spring of 2012, he debuted as a member of Exo, a group split into Korean and Chinese units, with Lay in the Chinese subunit Exo-M. The debut single 'Mama' introduced him to millions, but it was only the beginning.
Before South Korea, Lay had already tasted the stage. As a child he appeared in a Chinese television drama and later took third place on a talent show called 'Star Academy'. Those early moments mattered, but they did not prepare him for the brutal training system of K-pop, where teenagers spend years competing for a debut slot. Lay survived that system and learned to write, arrange, and translate songs in multiple languages, skills that would soon set him apart from other idols.
Solo music and chart records
The turning point came when he began releasing his own music. In the autumn of 2016, Lay put out his first mini-album 'Lose Control', with six songs in Mandarin. He wrote lyrics, arranged tracks, and translated them into English, Korean, and Japanese. Pre-orders passed two hundred thousand copies, and the album debuted at the top of South Korea's Gaon chart. A Chinese artist was now leading a Korean chart, a sign that his solo career had real weight.
His ambition kept growing. Two years later, his second studio album 'Namanana' entered the Billboard 200 at number 21, the highest position any Chinese artist had reached on that American chart. Around the same time, he appeared at Lollapalooza in the United States, sharing a stage with DJ Alan Walker. Then came the invitation to the Grammy Awards, where he was the only Chinese artist in attendance. The boy who once danced to Michael Jackson in Changsha was now walking red carpets in America.
The boy who once danced to Michael Jackson in Changsha was now walking red carpets in America.
Back home, Lay was becoming an institution. His autobiography, published when he was in his mid-twenties, sold over sixty-eight thousand copies in the first twenty-four minutes of pre-orders. He founded his own entertainment company, Chromosome Entertainment Group, and kept releasing music on his own terms. When his decade-long contract with SM Entertainment ended, he said he would still take part in Exo activities, a rare promise in an industry where departures often turn bitter.
The next chapter pointed west. Lay signed with an American agency to expand his work in Hollywood, and in the summer of 2024 he released 'Step', his first album entirely in English. That same year he won Musician of the Year at the Weibo Music Awards. The following year he dropped a new single and hinted that Exo might return with all nine members. For someone who started as a child mimicking a pop legend in a Chinese living room, the road from Changsha to the Grammys now looks less like a miracle and more like a plan.