Malaysian rapper Namewee seeking to recover lost YouTube contents

Taipei, April 5 (CNA) Malaysian rapper Namewee (黃明志) is trying to restore the nearly 1,000 videos on his YouTube channel that disappeared after his account was apparently hacked, his agent said Tuesday.

The rapper's agent said the musician's management team has reached out to YouTube for assistance in restoring the videos of his music and comments after they vanished overnight and the title of his channel was changed from "Namewee" to a sentence in Russian.

While Namewee's YouTube channel, which was set up in 2006, still was showing Tuesday afternoon that his videos have 3.27 million subscribers and have garnered 1,432,644,663 views, it also displayed the message "This channel has no videos."

Update: Rapper Namewee says hacked YouTube channel has been restored (April 6)

The rapper, known for his comments and songs that touch on sensitive social and political topics, made headlines in October when his song "Fragile" (玻璃心), a Mandarin ballad satirizing nationalistic Chinese internet users, was pulled from music streaming services in China one day after its release.

Namewee and his co-singer Kimberley Chen (陳芳語) also saw their accounts on China's popular microblogging site Weibo banned and all of their other songs removed online.

Despite the ban in China, "Fragile" was viewed over 10 million times on YouTube in the six days following its release, and was trending at No. 1 on the video site in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

A graduate of Taiwan's Ming Chuan University, Namewee has been nominated three times for best Mandarin male singer at Taiwan's Golden Melody Awards.

He splits his time between Taiwan and Malaysia and returned to Malaysia in January to promote "Nasi Lemak 1.0," a comedy he directed and starred in.