Few artists simply make music. Fewer still build entire worlds around it. Cacien, known also as Garlica Princess, belongs unmistakably to the second category. Her work refuses to sit comfortably within a single genre, aesthetic or even one fixed version of identity. Instead, it moves freely between pop, R&B, hip hop, jazz and experimentation, drawing inspiration from Chinese culture, life between different worlds, fashion, colour, humour and the complicated emotional terrain of becoming oneself. Her latest album, FLAVORS, turns that philosophy into its clearest expression yet, imagining emotion as something that can be tasted, remembered and carried long after the original experience has disappeared.
Long before Garlica Princess became an artistic identity, there was simply a little girl choosing between piano and dance lessons. Cacien chose the piano. By first grade, she had joined the choir and continued singing throughout high school, while privately imagining a future somewhere inside music and entertainment. In her childhood diary, she wrote that she wanted to become a “ming xing”, a celebrity. At the time, it was the kind of dream children write down without knowing whether life will ever take them there. For Cacien, however, that early instinct never disappeared. It simply waited for the moment when she would be willing to take it seriously.
That moment came after she left NYU and returned to China to pursue music full time. What had once been an imaginative childhood ambition became a decision with real consequences, particularly as changes within her family circumstances forced her to reconsider her priorities and look more seriously at the future she wanted to build. It was not simply a decision to become a musician. It was a decision to stop treating music as something that might happen one day and begin treating it as the life she was consciously choosing.
Her artistic identity has developed from that willingness to choose the unconventional. Cacien describes the universe she is creating as playful and exaggerated on the surface but emotionally honest underneath. It is an appropriate description for an artist whose work can be visually mischievous, colourful and occasionally absurd while carrying surprisingly intimate questions about identity, desire, insecurity, family and self discovery. Even her alter ego, Garlica Princess, carries a philosophy. Garlic is strong, distinctive and impossible to ignore. Some people are immediately drawn to it, while others need time to appreciate it. Either way, its presence lingers. Cacien wants her art to behave in much the same way. She does not want to create music that simply passes through the listener. She wants it to leave something behind.
That idea of lingering becomes particularly powerful in FLAVORS, her latest album released in 2026. The project takes something deeply familiar from her Chinese upbringing, food as a language of love, and transforms it into an emotional vocabulary. A particular taste can transport someone to childhood, a family dinner, a relationship or a moment that seemed insignificant at the time but somehow stayed. Cacien applies that same logic to emotion. Sweetness, bitterness, sourness, spice, numbness and the aftertaste of an experience become different ways of understanding the self.
What makes the concept compelling is that FLAVORS does not attempt to present Cacien as one polished or uncomplicated personality. Instead, it embraces contradiction. There is confidence alongside vulnerability, desire beside uncertainty and humour alongside heartbreak. Each song becomes its own emotional environment, accompanied by a distinct visual world. Red represents intense limerence, the almost uncontrollable feeling of falling for someone. Blue becomes vulnerability, the softness of allowing oneself to be seen. Yellow captures jealousy and the complicated insecurity that accompanies it, while green explores the relationship between the id and the ego, desire and self awareness, instinct and the question of who we believe ourselves to be. For Cacien, colour is therefore more than styling. It is part of the architecture of the music.
This approach reflects a wider characteristic of her creativity: nothing exists in isolation. Fashion, colour, visual storytelling and sound are interconnected languages. A particular food, colour or atmosphere can become the beginning of an entire creative direction. She is drawn to bright and unexpected combinations, to moments where awkwardness meets cultural symbolism and to images that create enough tension to make the viewer curious. It is a visual instinct that has been part of her career for years. Cacien has become recognised not only as a musician but also as a fashion and visual personality, with her work often refusing conventional boundaries between music, styling and digital culture. Her debut project Garlica Princess established that world through pop, jazz, R&B and hip hop, while the title persona became a playful but unapologetically confident extension of her personality.
Yet underneath the colour and humour is a serious commitment to emotional specificity. Cacien does not begin songwriting by asking whether everyone will understand the story. She begins with something real: a memory, a conversation, a sentence or a melody that arrives unexpectedly. She records ideas immediately, even when inspiration appears during something completely ordinary. Rather than making the emotion generic so that everyone can recognise it, she makes it specific to herself. In doing so, she believes the emotional truth becomes universal.
It is an interesting philosophy in a time when artists are increasingly encouraged to think about algorithms, short form videos and immediate audience reactions before the work itself has had time to breathe. Social media was an important early door for Cacien. Covers and creative videos allowed listeners to discover her before traditional industry opportunities were widely available, while digital platforms gave her an unusually direct relationship with an audience. Her career has also demonstrated how powerful those platforms can be. LEGO described Cacien in 2025 as a Chinese alt pop and fashion artist living between China and the United States, noting that her debut album had generated more than 650 million views on Douyin.
Yet she is equally aware of the danger of allowing the digital environment to become the creative compass. There was a period when she deliberately stepped away from social media to protect her inner peace and concentration. Returning meant learning how to use short form content strategically without allowing trends to determine the direction of her music. For Cacien, a video may be the doorway through which someone discovers her, but it is the music, the visuals and the live experience that should give that person a reason to stay.
That distinction becomes especially important when she performs. In the studio, she describes herself as wrestling with her own emotions. On stage, the relationship changes because the audience becomes part of the chemistry. Nervousness does not disappear, but it becomes something to embrace rather than suppress. A song that began as a private thought can suddenly become a collective experience, with the audience changing the way she moves, sings and breathes. It is perhaps here that the meaning of confidence becomes clearer. For Cacien, confidence is not perfection. It is presence, the ability to allow people to see different sides of you without needing to make every side equally polished.
That philosophy also explains why optimism continues to appear throughout her work, even when the subject matter becomes painful. She recognises that her music often carries a sadness beneath it, but there is almost always a brighter colour underneath the darkness. She describes it almost like adding honey to a bitter dish. The bitterness remains, but so does the sweetness. It is an idea that feels central to Cacien’s artistic personality. She is not interested in pretending that difficult emotions do not exist. She simply refuses to give them the final word.
Perhaps the most ambitious expression of that philosophy is still ahead. Cacien imagines transforming FLAVORS into an immersive musical in which audiences would not merely listen to the story but enter it. Sound, visuals, movement and even scent would become part of the experience. The inspiration comes from a childhood memory of a Disneyland show where an image of a cake appeared on screen and the theatre suddenly filled with the smell of cake. Years later, that small moment remains with her, a reminder that art can become powerful when it engages more than one sense. Her ambition is to create that same sense of wonder through her own work, making an audience wonder whether they have somehow stepped inside a song.
The future version of FLAVORS she imagines would combine pop with club music, hip hop and R&B while incorporating Teochew and other regional sounds. The intention is not simply to mix genres for novelty, but to create something that could only emerge from her particular cultural background and experience of living between worlds. That may ultimately be the most interesting thing about Cacien. She is not trying to resolve the contradictions within herself. She is turning them into material.
Chinese and global, playful and serious, sweet and pungent, vulnerable and fearless, musician and visual artist, Cacien and Garlica Princess. Her three words for the next chapter of her journey are “unorthodox, pungent, lingering”, and they sound almost like a manifesto. Unorthodox, because she does not want to fit the shapes already waiting for her. Pungent, because she wants her work to possess a flavour that cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. Lingering, because the greatest art does not necessarily end when the music stops. Sometimes it remains as a colour in the mind, a strange image, a memory, a feeling or an aftertaste that cannot quite be explained.
And that is precisely where Cacien seems most at home, somewhere between the familiar and the unexpected, creating music that tastes like memory and looks like imagination. That is the world of Garlica Princess, a world built from sound, colour, culture, humour and emotion, and once you enter it, it is designed to stay with you.
