Rebel With A Cause

Ayden Sng represents a new breed of star. He has the talent and the looks, but he also has daring and grit to spare. Determined to do things his way, the actor and musician talks about breaking out of boxes and tearing up the rule book.

- Jeffrey Yan

The rise of Ayden Sng marks the arrival of a new kind of leading man. At 28, Sng is a true multi-tasking millennial—a star who is as comfortable on a TV set (he can be seen next as the lead in the upcoming Mediacorp Chinese drama Truth about Us) as he is on a stage with a microphone and an erhu (he recently released an erhu cover of the BTS hit “Butter” and directed the accompanying music video), or in his living room shooting clips for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. He refuses to be bound by conventional boundaries, nor does he think that certain mediums are lesser than others—to him, it’s all content and a good content creator excels at all. This boldness extends to the way he navigates fame as well. Opinionated and outspoken, Sng does not shy away from speaking up. On this BAZAAR shoot, he was one of the rare subjects who would enthusiastically discuss the mood board with the creative team, inspect the rack, offer his thoughts on the collections and pieces pulled, and then run excitedly to his car to grab some of his own stuff that he thinks would work. “I love that this shoot plays with gender neutrality, like how you can look masculine in clothes that aren’t conventionally so. It’s something that I personally like to push as well,” he says of the concept. In our interview, he is equally candid, opening up about his struggles in an industry with rules and hierarchies that seem archaic to him, and his grander ambitions to make a name for himself beyond TV. This is Ayden Sng in his own words.

ON NOT BEING BOXED IN