Profile | ‘The thrill of possibly screwing up’: how DJ with ADHD found her groove in Hong Kong’s drum and bass scene – then grew
- When Abby Yuen was growing up in Hong Kong she couldn’t make anything except music stick. It was only years later that she was diagnosed with ADHD
- She threw herself into the city’s dance music scene, and found she was good at DJing. Now she’s begun creating her own sound art and is working on a new EP
When Abby Yuen started to immerse herself in dance music as a teenager, she wasted little time jumping into DJing. Now in her late twenties, the DJ and producer, who goes by the alias Just Bee, already has a decade of “vibe curator” experience behind her.
For much of her adolescence and early adulthood in Hong Kong, she was plagued by an inability to make anything other than music stick – that was, until she got her ADHD diagnosis three years ago.
“I was diagnosed quite late in life. I’d abandoned so many hobbies and changed so many jobs that I was like, ‘Why can’t I stay in one thing?’” she says.
“With ADHD, you have trouble keeping focus and need a thrill with a good reward; with DJing, there’s a risk, because you could f*** up a beat match and the whole club would be silent.
“People are there to have fun, and you have that extra pressure to perform. The thrill of possibly screwing up, that’s what I really liked.”
