At the Nov. 6 press conference to announce the impending launch of the 2006 Taiwan International Film and TV Expo, artist Chen Zi-fu was introduced as a “national treasure.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call myself a national treasure,” said the 80-year-old Chen with customary humility. “But I’ve probably painted more film posters than anyone else in the world.”
In the days before digital and printing technology made it possible for theaters around the island to put up huge, photograph-quality posters of the movies they are showing, artists were hired to paint the billboards. In the field of movie-poster painting, Chen was the undisputed champ, both in terms of quantity and, according to his fans, quality. Over the last 50 years, he painted an estimated 5,000 posters.
“If it wasn’t for the Japanese defeat in World War II, I would never have had a career as a painter,” said Chen. At the age of 19, he was drafted into the imperial Japanese Navy and issued orders to report for training as a battleship gunner’s mate. At the time, Taiwan was a colony of Japan, and many Taiwanese men were conscripted in the fight against the allies. Chen shipped out, but before reaching his training base in Nagasaki, his transport ship was sunk by an allied torpedo. Of the 303 new recruits on board, Chen and 87 others survived and made it to Nagasaki.
On Jan. 2, 1946, with the help of some friends, he managed to make it back to Taiwan from post-war Japan. Upon his return he found a war-shattered island recently ceded to the Chinese Nationalists in dire economic straits. Jobs were scarce, but he managed to get hired on at White Day Studio, a company that specialized in billboard design. He worked there for a month before seeking greener pastures.
Chen found work at the Taiwan branch of the Shanghai Cathay Film Co., which released films made during the Sino-Japanese War in China. For the 18 months he worked for Shanghai Cathay, Chen volunteered to restore the film posters that had been damaged due to the poor quality of the paper used in the post-war era.
Sometimes, when he was unable to save a poster using restoration techniques, Chen would recreate it from scratch. He repainted many new posters for old movies using the techniques he picked up from Japanese poster painters.
“At that time, going to the movies was such a luxury that not too many kids could afford it,” Chen recalled. “Ever since I snuck into the back of a theater and saw what was happening in that room full of billboards, I started sneaking back in as often as I could, just to watch the Japanese painter work.”
When the KMT government introduced the New Taiwan Dollar in 1949 and had people exchange their old Taiwan Dollars at a 40,000:1 exchange rate, he lost his job. Fortunately, he had developed a reputation as an excellent poster painter and it was not long before he was hired to paint 40 film posters by the Datung Film Co., which distributed Cantonese films produced in Hong Kong. He started his own business and has never looked back.
Chen was witness to the Feb. 28 Incident of 1947, in which Taiwanese civilians launched an islandwide uprising after government agents beat an old woman peddling untaxed cigarettes. The incident sparked a rebellion against KMT rule, and to put it down, Governor-General Chen Yi ordered the troops to retaliate, and more than 15,000 Taiwanese--whom the new Chinese regime viewed as having been infected by Japanization--were killed.
Rather than join the riots against the new rulers recently arrived from the mainland, Chen chose to stay at home. “I hid my Shanghainese boss in my friend’s home in the meantime,” recalled Chen. The incident was followed by the period known as White Terror, when Taiwanese elites were systematically arrested or killed or simply disappeared if it was felt they were a threat to the state. “Later on, a few friends of mine were arrested, and I never saw them again,” said Chen.
This period of political upheaval interrupted his peace of mind, Chen admitted, but it did not detract from his dedication to his work. During the heyday of Taiwanese-dialect filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s, Chen could finish an entire poster in just three hours, and he was churning out 40 posters a month. At the time, most of his competitors could only handle about 100 a year.
“They didn’t need a script, a director or a cast to convince investors back in those days. All they needed was a colorful poster with the name of the film” said Chen. “In fact, film production companies could then go ahead and produce the entire movie in just 10 days,” he recalled.
The large number of Taiwanese horror, war, comedy and romance films being made in those days sustained Chen’s career. He was especially a fan of the Kung Fu movies, with their tried and tested recurring themes of loyalty, betrayal and revenge, and in which justice always prevailed in the end. Chen’s posters showed all these elements.
His favorite poster, and the only one he continues to display to this day, was for a 1969 film called “A Touch of Zen.” Directed by King Hu, it won the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes in 1975 and was listed by the Hong Kong Film Awards as one of the top 100 Chinese motion pictures. To Chen, of course, it is all about the poster.
“I made a daring trial on that poster. Instead of painting major characters on a piece of blank paper, I used black color as the background, which no one else had ever tried before,” he said. He still keeps his original poster hanging on the wall of his apartment in Taipei.
The painter liked to take a little artistic license when composing one of his posters, rather than sticking too closely to the promotional material provided by the production company. In “Battle of Tien Mountain,” for example, the ugly, twisted face of the Ming Dynasty official appears at the right, while the female warrior holds a sword in the center and another swordsman is depicted on the left.
“Imagination is the key to finding the details. For instance, the way she holds the sword, the facial expressions on the main characters and the color of the background, are all from my own imagination, because the film company did not provide that much detail,” Chen recalled.
He pointed out that one of the main characteristics of his posters is that he applied techniques from the traditional Chinese impressionistic ink painting, which stresses a fine control of the ink flow within one stroke when you wield a soft brush. That can be exemplified in the treatment of hair by not applying an extra-fine brush, a technique exercised by many of his contemporaries. He takes special pride in the way he was able to capture the eyes of the main characters.