The media queen of New York’s Chinese set: Yuhan Liu continues to build
In New York’s Chinese business community, Yuhan Liu is the media and PR name people call when a brand has to cross over. 15 years ago, she started as a journalist at China Daily New York, and then as a core member of a New York Times investigative team she shared in the project’s recognition as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The reporting also pushed then-Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign a law protecting immigrant workers in the nail-salon industry. In 2024, Forbes China named her among its Top 100 Most Influential Chinese Overseas. Branding, press, influencer campaigns, New York Fashion Week shows, Asian-American TV&Film Festivals — she has since run all of it, and for years she was the person who could take a Chinese label from a closed circle onto a global runway and into mainstream coverage. That reputation was built inside one community. Today, co-founding Fashion Week Forever with New York’s leading fashion personality Chris Lavish is the next move: the same newsroom instinct, now pointed at a much larger crowd than the one that already knew her name. The 2024 Forbes China named her among its Top 100 Most Influential Chinese Overseas. That journalist-turned PR specialist and entrepreneur has already stacked a set of milestones. In 2026 she is still marching, and the titles keep adding.
2024 Coofandy New York Fashion Week Show co-produced by China Fashion Collective and Yuhan Liu
Yuhan Liu hosting an online show for China Daily New York branch in 2012
She founded HAN Media and China Fashion Collective in the same year, 2016. HAN Media is the generalist: branding, social media, influencer campaigns, event production — the toolkit international companies use when they want the American market to take them seriously. From 2017 to 2019 the firm was also a founding member of the Asian-American TV & Film Festival, which brought filmmakers from Asia, Hollywood, and New York into Symphony Space. China Fashion Collective kept the fashion calendar: New York Fashion Week shows, year after year, for dozens of brands out of China. The roster has included Consinee Group, the country’s largest cashmere and wool producer, and Sailvan, the publicly listed e-commerce group behind Amazon’s top menswear and womenswear labels Coofandy and Ekouaer.
Yuhan Liu and the co-founders of Asian-American TV&Film Festival receiving recognition from then assemblyman Felix Ortiz on behalf of New York State Assembly.
Amazon leading women’s wear Ekaeour New York Fashion Week Show co-produced by China Fashion Collective and Yuhan Liu
Then Covid came, the industry took a pause button, and so did she. After Covid hit New York City the hard way, she stepped off the show floor, escaped New York and flew to Asia and spent two years in business school there, and walked through nearly a hundred companies and factories in China — not as tourism, but as fieldwork on what outbound brands need when they look west. The pause was not an ending. It was a second education.
The return was loud. In 2024 she came back to New York with a seven-figure production: Sailvan’s NYFW show, Coofandy and Ekouaer at the landmark Cipriani on 25 Broadway, China Fashion Collective and HAN Media building the night from the ground up. Two months, split time zones, countless sleepless nights, a fancy stage at New York’s landmark Cipriani, she led a team of more than 100 people to build the iconic show from ground up. That was the comeback project. It also proved the old muscle still worked after the years away.
Three years after, what she is building now is not only another fashion show or a press conference.
With restaurant operators who already run successful New York kitchens, she co-founded Voyager Group, a platform meant to carry Asian restaurant brands into North America. She is learning the floor from people who already own it. With those partners she also put money into a Mixue shop in Union Square — a corner franchise of a milk-tea network on the order of 60,000 stores worldwide. HAN Media, ten years in, is the hinge: the agency’s branding and creator work feed the new companies; the new companies give the agency categories it did not have when the only product was a designer’s first New York slot.
Europe-Based model Rafael Miller posing for a photo after he walked for Coofandy
The venture she puts first among the new ones is Fashion Week Forever (fashionweekforever.com), co-founded with New York’s leading fashion personality Chris Lavish. Together they bring more than twenty-five years of experience in media, fashion and PR to a simple problem: NYFW is still the city’s loudest week, and the community around it is still a bit loose. Their answer is building a hub for lifestyle/fashion influencers and content creators — a subscription pool of about 3,000 names — matched to brands through media relations, event productions, branding, social campaigns, and creator programs, then walked onto calendars beyond Manhattan. The point is not another recap site. It is to plug that hub into the influencer economy that American brands are already paying for. U.S. creator and influencer spend now runs in the tens of billions of dollars a year; most U.S. marketers already buy creator work. A platform that can introduce a brand to the right few thousand people is infrastructure for that market, not a side magazine.
She will say the PR career is still in progress. That is accurate. 2011-2015: newsroom. 2016: two companies. 2017–19: a film festival in a landmark theater. A pandemic, a campus, a hundred factory gates. 2024: a seven-figure Sailvan show, and a Forbes China list. 2026: enhanced PR service at HAN Media, a milk tea store, and a fashion-week hub built for the creator economy. She is not a creator in the grid sense. She is an entrepreneur who keeps adding titles and proves that she can excel with every title.
New York is still the city that can hold a Shenzhen designer, an Amazon label, an Asian-fusion kitchen, a Union Square tea counter, and 3,000 people with cameras — if someone keeps connecting them. In 2026, that remains her job.
Supermodel Sean O’ Pry closing the Coofandy S/S 2025 NYFW show
