What has Fan Bingbing been up to lately?

Over the New Year weekend, Fan Bingbing has been booked and busy, and closer to us than we would have guessed – livestreaming in Sunset Way, greeting fans at Jewel Changi Airport, and selling more sheet masks than most local influencers move in a year. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what you might have missed.

Ringing in 2026 with a cultural award

The 44-year-old actress made a recent visit to Melaka, where she currently serves as a tourism ambassador, to receive the Melaka International Cultural Diplomacy Icon Award – a recognition of her efforts in fostering cross-cultural ties. The honour follows her earlier conferment of the Darjah Pangkuan Seri Melaka (DPSM) in August 2025, which granted her the title of Datuk. While in Melaka, she also stopped by a local Watsons outlet to visit her beauty brand Fan Beauty Diary, describing the gesture as “small, but meaningful,” according to The New Straits Times.

She then kicked off the new year on a couch in Singapore

Not long after her Melaka visit, she turned up in a setting few would have predicted – on a Facebook livestream in Singapore.

The Star reports that on New Year’s Day, Bingbing made a surprise appearance alongside Singaporean father‑son duo Patrick and Ryan Low – livestream sellers better known for peddling household goods than celebrity skincare. Clad in an off‑shoulder frock and speaking in Mandarin, she introduced her Fan Beauty Diary line to a casual online audience of around 20,000 viewers.

The stream broke the Lows’ own sales records: over S$1 million worth of Bingbing’s products were sold in just 20 minutes. She stayed for half an hour, joked about being invited via WeChat, and later turned down the idea of launching her own livestream channel. “Too arduous,” she said. “Beauty is my hobby. Acting is my profession.”

But it’s her brand doing the heavy lifting

Fan Beauty Diary has been steadily expanding across Southeast Asia. It joined Singapore’s TikTok Shop in 2024, and launched in Watsons Malaysia later that year. Singapore, now her second offline market outside China, sees the brand stocked across 22 Watsons stores islandwide.

To mark the rollout, Bingbing hosted a fan meet at Jewel Changi Airport on January 3 – but not without a catch. Entry required a minimum spend of S$499 on her products. One attendee, who qualified by accident, admitted she hadn’t planned to meet Fan at all. “I just wanted to try the masks,” she told The Straits Times.

The turnout was strong. Photos were snapped, products moved fast, and Bingbing later reflected on the local crowd: “Singaporean girls are disciplined,” she said. “They go to the gym more, eat cleanly – they’re healthier.”

Asked how C-beauty compares to K-beauty, she didn’t miss a beat. “K-beauty’s packaging is better,” she said, “but our ingredients and formulas are stronger.”

A comeback in the making?

While much of the recent attention has centred on her beauty business, Bingbing has also returned to the screen. Mother Bhumi, a Malaysian indie film in which she plays a farmer and part-time exorcist, earned her the Best Actress award at the Golden Horse Awards in November 2025 – her first major film recognition since being sidelined by a 2018 tax scandal that prompted her retreat from China’s entertainment industry.

Reflecting on that period in a Weibo post last year, she wrote: “Every hurdle was difficult, but I overcame them all.” In an earlier interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she described her five-year absence as a “gift” – a pause that allowed her to recalibrate and reconnect with work that felt more meaningful. Now based in Hong Kong, her current rhythm – acting, building a beauty brand, moving between Malaysia and Singapore – appears measured rather than rushed.