Childhood & Early Life
Henry Lau was born on October 11, 1989, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His father is from Hong Kong with a Teochew descent and his mother hails from Pingtung, Taiwan.
At the age of five he began to take piano lessons from his mother and at age six he started learning violin. With time he learned to play several other musical instruments including the electric violin. Later he earned the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) Regional Gold Medal for Level 10 for both piano and violin.
Brought up in Willowdale, a middle-class neighbourhood in Toronto city, Henry studied in different schools at different points of time including in ‘Kenollie Public School’, ‘Steelesview Public School’, and ‘Zion Heights Junior High School’.
In ninth grade he attended ‘North Toronto Collegiate Institute’ and then joined ‘A.Y. Jackson Secondary School’ in Toronto where he undertook rest of his high school studies.
While in high school he learnt the boogaloo popping dance form and after a year of learning he started taking part in dance (popping) contests and shows. He is also skilled in various other dance forms.
Son participated at the 2006 S.M. Entertainment Global Audition at Toronto and he was selected as one of the two participants from a total of 3000 candidates.
For a short while, he attended University of Toronto with Music Performance Major in 2007.
He can speak English, French, Korean, Cantonese and Mandarin language.
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Career
On September 20, 2007, the R&B/rock song ‘Don't Don’ was released by the Korean boy band ‘Super Junior’ for their second album ‘Don't Don’. The violin part in the song was contributed by Henry.
Starting from 2007, he has appeared in several Chinese and Korean variety TV shows including in ‘Star King’ (2007), ‘Hello Counselor’ (2013), ‘Happy Together’ (2014), ‘We Got Married’ (2015) and ‘I Live Alone’ (2017).
South Korean entertainment company S.M. Entertainment declared in October 2007 that in 2008 Henry would make his debut as member of the Chinese-South Korean boy band ‘Super Junior-M’. It is a sub-group of Super Junior China that became the first international music group in the history of Chinese music industry to have both members of Chinese and Korean descent.
However, his debut as "mystery violinist" in ‘Don't Don’ added with rumours of Henry becoming the fourteenth member of ‘Super Junior’ stemmed up a controversy that saw fans of the group forming an “Only 13” campaign.
On April 8, 2008, ‘Super Junior-M’ made their debut at the 8th Annual Music Chart Awards in Beijing while releasing their debut music video, ‘U’ on Sohu.com on that very day. The single that was a Chinese remake of the original ‘Super Junior’ song ‘U’ (2006) was included as lead single in their April 23, 2008 released debut album ‘Me’.
In 2009, he along with other Super Junior-M members featured in a cameo role in the CCTV2 Chinese drama ‘Stage of Youth’ that had ‘Super Junior’ member Han Geng in lead role. The other dramas he featured included ‘My Sweet City’ (2013), ‘Persevere, Goo Hae-ra’ (2015) and ‘Oh My Venus’ (2015).
The first mini-album of ‘Super Junior-M’ titled ‘Super Girl’ that released on September 23, 2009 was successful in winning over music lovers and fetched the group "Best Vocal Group" nomination at the 21st Golden Melody Awards that is Chinese equivalent to Grammy Awards.
‘Super Girl’ peaked at #1 in several charts including in Taiwan, China and Philippines thus bringing the members of the group including Henry to the limelight.
In 2009, he also performed the song ‘Sick of Love’ during Super Show 2, the second Asia-wide live concert tour of ‘Super Junior’. The song that still remained unreleased was written, composed and produced by him.
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He composed the song ‘All My Heart’ along with Super Junior's leader Leeteuk which found place in the repackaged version C of the group’s fourth studio album ‘Bonamana’ that released on June 28, 2010. Their next collaboration was the song ‘Andante’ included in the September 19, 2011, released fifth repackaged album of the group ‘A-CHa’.
He then took a break to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
Henry has appeared as a rapper in tracks of other artists like Zhang Li Yin and Jonghyun and Jino; rearranged the song ‘Baby’ by Justin Bieber and performed it for the Super Show 3 Tour.
His only big-screen endeavour so far saw him playing one of the main roles of Mark starring along with Chin Han and Michelle Yeoh in the Gina Kim directed South Korean-Thai drama film ‘Final Recipe’. It premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival on September 21, 2013.
He along with Gen Neo, Neil Nallas, and Isaac Han formed a music production team ‘Noize Bank’. It produced and composed two songs ‘Go’ and ‘It's You’ that were included in the January 7, 2013, released second studio album of ‘Super Junior-M’ titled ‘Break Down’.
On June 7, 2013, S.M. Entertainment released Henry’s debut solo EP ‘Trap’ in South Korea. The Chinese version of the song was released on August 14, 2013. The album peaked at #2 in the Gaon Weekly album chart and at #5 in the Gaon Monthly album chart in South Korea while it peaked at #3 in the US Billboard World Albums chart.
His second EP ‘Fantastic’ was released by S.M. Entertainment in South Korea on July 14, 2014. His Japanese debut marked the release of the single ‘Fantastic’ in Japanese language along with its music video in Japan on October 8 of that year under the record label ‘Avex Trax’.
On March 18, 2017 he released his self-written and self-composed digital single ‘Girlfriend’ that garnered favourable responses and peaked atop many South Korean daily digital charts.
For the last few years he has featured in several endorsements including for Sprite (2014), Innisfree-Play Green App (2016), Uniqlo Project (2017) and Kelloogs cereal (2017) among others.
