The festival brought together artists from fourteen Asian countries and will be broadcast on twenty television stations in Asia. It gathered ovel 45,000 viewers at the main stadium of the 2002 Football World Cup in Seoul for a three-hour show.
Despite the fact that Ruslana was invited as a Special Guest Star, she nevertheless was awarded two special trophies at the festival. The first of them was the golden statue of The Best Artist Award of The Asia Song Festival 2009, the main award of the festival and the second special award for the contribution to the cultural exchange between Ukraine and Asia in music.
“We were quite nervous before heading to the stage. How will our music be received by the Korean, Japanese, Chinese – the entire Asian audience, since for them we are representatives of a completely different culture? Ukraine for them is as distant and mysterious as, for example, Malaysia or Indonesia for us Europeans. However, the passionate welcome we received from the 40,000 people at Seoul’s main stadium doesn’t just inspire us, but literally compels us to keep coming back over and over again to Korea and other Asian countries in the future,” Ruslana said.
Right after the final of the sixth Asia Song Festival, Ruslana received an invitation to take part in the seventh edition of the festival in 2010. The Ukrainian singer is already considering recording a single together with a widely popular Korean celebrity artist at the beginning of 2010.
Ruslana won the 2004 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest with her song Wild Dances, bringing Europe's favourite TV-show to Ukraine for the first time in 2006.
