We sit with Daniel Cheang, content creator, Astro Gempak TV host, actor and also our January digital cover star, to talk about some of the things he’s looking forward to in the year to come.
Daniel Cheang is as sure-fire and he is sure-footed — whatever he aims for, he is determined to get. With at least a decade of training and experience in hosting, Daniel has had his fair share of milestones. The year 2022 alone was huge for the Penangite career-wise: he got to interview some of the biggest stars including Benedict Cumberbatch for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Letitia Wright for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, as well as the star-studded cast of The Zone: Survival Mission. He got to host the Anugerah MeleTOP Era 2021 showcase. He also made his debut in acting, alongside Nia Atasha, in the drama series IMperfect on Astro as the ever-fabulous Fab. But underneath the glitz, there’s more to discover about Daniel — a journey that he, too, is excited to embark on. Here are three things that Daniel is hoping for in the coming year.
Daniel is on a mission to realign himself. That includes refocusing everything back to himself, and returning to his roots. “This might sound a little cliché,” he begins sheepishly, “but for as long as my career has been ongoing, I haven’t really been prioritising myself — because I have been attached to one major company.” In 2023, Daniel makes a rather big move: he aims to continue with his family’s business of creating chilli paste with a recipe that has been passed down from his yeye (grandfather). It’s something he considers very close to him as it is a big part of his hometown in Penang.
He wants to take up Chinese-speaking (Mandarin) lessons. “It’s more of a self- development kind of thing for me rather than anything else,” Daniel tells us. Born into a Cantonese-speaking home and having to learn Malay, Daniel is no stranger to the fluidity of languages. And we’re not surprised that he aims to learn Mandarin, seeing as it’s the most spoken language in the world.
He wants to rekindle his love for content creation. While he is most popular for his content on Astro Gempak, Daniel is in fact a true content creator at heart — with close to 15,000 followers on Instagram, and reaching 60,000 followers on TikTok. Before he ventured onto Astro Gempak, Daniel also periodically uploaded videos on his YouTube channel documenting his travelling and short films that he directed himself. His big goal for 2023 is to return to that and properly focus on putting out his own content again.
Find out more about Alvy Joanna and Daniel Cheang, our cover stars, in the latest issue of LSA Digital Cover Vol. 007 HERE.
Puteri Yasmin Suraya
Writer
Hailing from an English Literature & Creative Writing background, Yasmin has a deep love for fiction and poetry. When she’s not writing or café-hopping, she spends most of her time in the comfort of her own room binge-watching period romances, (badly) belting out show tunes, and curating Spotify playlists to match her mood for the week.
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