Meet the Chinese TikTok star whose intricate finger dances inspired the choreography in Grimes' 'Violence' music video
- Cindy, or @Cindy518c, is a rising star on TikTok as well as its Chinese equivalent, Douyin.
- Cindy's elaborate finger dances recently inspired the choreography for Grimes' "Violence" music video. And like Grimes, Cindy incorporates cosplay and video game aesthetics into her work.
- Currently, Cindy boasts more than 10 million followers on TikTok, 199 million followers on Instagram, and 11,000 subscribers on YouTube.
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Meet Cindy: TikTok's reigning "queen of finger dance." Hailing from China's Shandong province, her given name is Han Qui. But online, millions of followers — including the likes of experimental pop princess Grimes — know her simply as Cindy, a nickname given to her by one of her foreigner friends.
"In 2018, I accidentally saw a video of finger dance on the internet, and began to imitate and create my own works," Cindy told Insider. "It was Aleks Kost. The first finger dance I saw was his work."
Cindy has been dancing since she was six, but it wasn't until discovering Kost's finger dances that her career on TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin, truly took off. Now, the masked star has over 10 million TikTok followers.
And this year, all of Cindy's hard work led to an unexpected shout-out from Grimes in an interview with Harper's Bazaar about the music video for "Violence," one of the lead singles off her new record "Miss Anthropocene."
"The choreography was like, very inspired by this girl Cindy on TikTok," Grimes told the magazine. "It's like, all this weird kind of like, gun sh-t, but it's cute hand choreography, which I really like."
Finger dancing, or tutting, is a style of dance that's been around since the 90s, at least. Supposedly, these angular finger movements are intended to mimic the angular poses seen on ancient Egyptian reliefs. But the militaristic style of finger dancing Cindy specializes in didn't originate on the streets, but rather, on a multiplayer shooter game series called PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (or PUBG, as it's known amongst fans).
Dance challenges inspired by PUBG and Fortnite "emotes" are not a new trend. On Fortnite, these emotes can be purchased à la carte for somewhere between $5 and $10, purely as a fun, cosmetic enhancement for your character of choice. But rarely can dancers copy these PUBG finger dances with as much grace and precision as Cindy. And now, she's moved on to composing her own, often to the beat of Korean pop music.
"Whenever there is good music, I'll try to create it," she wrote. "Usually, shooting the video is about 4 to 6 hours. It takes 2 days to shoot and edit a 15-second video."
Cindy occasionally rocks cosplay-esque costumes in her videos, but in all of her uploads, she sports a face mask. This sartorial choice, however, has nothing to do with the ongoing pandemic.
"It is a coincidence to wear a mask," she explained. "I wanted everyone to focus on my work, not my appearance."
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