Bad luck sometimes seems to follow you around. After the release of her sixth studio album, Woo Twenty-one, Korean pop queen Park Ji-yoon encountered one misfortune after another. Her new single, Can You Do It?, was banned by two South Korean national TV stations for its provocative lyrics about sex. The album was then uploaded illegally on to the Internet before its release. Added to that is the end of her record and management deals, which threw the album's official release in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland into doubt.
A source close to the singer claims she is extremely depressed, because she is keen to launch her new material as a thank-you gift to her supportive Chinese fans.
In fact, it is intriguing how Park sold 500,000 records in the region - a figure that makes her the best-selling Korean singer in greater China. Park, 21, sings in Korean, a language unfamiliar to most of her Chinese fans.
'It means a lot to me that I'm popular among Chinese-speaking people, because they don't understand what I'm singing. It means they like me for my music,' Park says through her Putonghua interpreter while on a recent trip to Hong Kong.
The recent turn of events perhaps served as minor tests for the singer. After all, she has lived in the spotlight for more than a decade. She started modelling for print adverts when she was 10, and by the time she was 15, she had released her debut album, Far Away, which sold more than 300,000 copies.
But it was her fourth album, Sung Een Sheek (2000), that propelled her to international stardom. Her catchy dance tunes and sexy image - the album's title translates as 'Mature Celebration' - made Park Korea's queen of pop.
