On a Saturday night in 2024, a queue stretched around the block outside a record store in Mong Kok for a MIRROR album release event. The fans — mostly young women in their twenties, though with a significant contingent of older Hongkongers and a scattering of visitors from the mainland who had made the trip specifically — had been waiting since before dawn. This is not, in itself, unusual for K-pop releases in Hong Kong. What made it unusual was the language on the posters. Not Korean. Not English. Cantonese. For the first time in a very long time, the most anticipated local entertainment event in Hong Kong involved music made in Hong Kong, in Hong Kong's language, by artists who came from here.
MIRROR — the 12-member boy group that emerged from ViuTV's "King Maker" talent competition in 2018 — is the most successful homegrown Hong Kong pop act since the golden age of Cantopop in the 1980s and 1990s that produced Leslie Cheung, Anita Mui, and the Four Heavenly Kings. That comparison is not hyperbole; it is the framing used by music industry veterans who have watched with unconcealed astonishment as a reality show product became a cultural movement. At their peak, MIRROR sold out eight concerts at the Hong Kong Coliseum in under two minutes. Endorsement deals poured in. Individual members — Lokman, Anson Lo, Edan Lui, Jeremy Lee — became household names on a par with television and film actors who had been building careers for decades.
What MIRROR represents in the context of Hong Kong's turbulent recent history is impossible to separate from the music itself. The group emerged at a moment when the city was processing tremendous upheaval — the 2019 protests, the subsequent political changes, the pandemic, the emigration wave — and offered something that felt, to its fanbase, genuinely specific to Hong Kong: young men who had grown up in Cha chaan tengs and housing estates, who spoke Cantonese with local accents, who sang about emotions that were recognisable from local lived experience rather than translated from a Seoul production template. The act of listening to MIRROR, for many of their fans, became in some sense an act of staying — a choice to invest emotionally in Hong Kong's present and future rather than its losses.
The tragedy at their 2022 Hong Kong Coliseum concert — when a faulty screen installation collapsed, injuring multiple performers — cast a long shadow and tested the group and their fanbase in ways that went beyond entertainment. The recovery was slow and careful. Individual members took different paths during the hiatus: some pursued acting, some released solo music, some focused on their mental health in public ways that increased rather than diminished their connection to their audience. When MIRROR returned to perform together, the emotional charge was complex — relief, grief, loyalty, and a particular Hong Kong tenacity that the city's residents recognise in themselves.
Their music, which blends Cantonese pop conventions with contemporary R&B, hip-hop, and production styles, is not radical. It is careful, polished, and emotionally accessible. That is not a criticism. In a city that has had more than enough of radical uncertainty, music that feels like home — in the language of home, with faces from home — has its own kind of power.
Cantopop is not dead. MIRROR proved that. Whether Hong Kong's entertainment industry can sustain the conditions for a next generation to follow them is a different question, and a more uncertain one. For now, the queues in Mong Kok are real.
