Chen Tzu-fu made his living by painting--not misty scenes of distant peaks or famous people, but movie posters--and in a career that spanned half a century he became Taiwan's chief proponent of this individual art form. More than fifty of his works were recently displayed in Taipei at the exhibition Retrospective Silhouette: One Century of Posters.
Chen Tzu-fu (陳子福) prides himself on being the only artist in Taiwan, perhaps the world, who has dedicated his entire career to painting movie posters. Chen, who will turn 71 this year, has spent more than half a century creating over 5,000 motion-picture posters. And not just any old posters: his have always been unique. Their signature-touch of flowing lines and bold colors reflect the robustness of life in Taiwan as few other artistic creations can.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that Chen never studied how to paint posters. He is that rare creature, a born artist. Even as a child, he showed strong interest in painting. "Whenever I entered an art competition at school, I used to win the prize for best painting," Chen says. If he found it hard to concentrate on a lecture he would sketch the teacher's portrait. "Once I was caught drawing the supervisor during an exam," he recalls. "He told me to come to his office after the test. He gave me a real dressing-down and I thought I was done for. But then at the end he told me to sign the sketch and give it to him--he wanted to keep it!"
Born in 1926, Chen grew up during the Japanese occupation. After graduation from senior high school, he went to Japan to study in a naval academy. One year later, World War II ended and he returned to Taiwan. "After I came back, I didn't know what to do," he says. "I'd had a Japanese education and so I knew nothing about the Chinese language. I was a bit afraid."
Fortunately, through a friend's recommendation, he was able to find a job at a movie company that did not involve too much writing. He was responsible for fixing up movie posters that had been damaged--a frequent occurrence in those days, because very few posters were produced for each movie, and when a film was taken from one theater to another the posters had to travel with it.
Then one day a movie showed up without any advertising materials, and so Chen drew his first ever movie poster. "My boss didn't ask me to," he says. "I just did it, without any prompting." The vividly-painted poster ensured that the movie did good business. It also boosted Chen's confidence, and after that he occasionally painted posters for his company just for the fun of it. "I just did it because I like painting," he says.
But a year later, in 1949, the government announced a drastic revaluation of the Taiwan dollar. "My monthly income suddenly dropped to just NT$1.25, from the original $50,000," he recalls. He could no longer support his family. So, with encouragement from his friends, he quit his job at the movie company and started to paint movie posters at home. "There was this movie company owner named Ko," he says. "She imported several foreign films and commissioned me to paint the posters. At first I hesitated, because I'd never studied painting. But she encouraged me, and I took about a year to finish the forty posters she'd ordered."
Chen worked very carefully. In order to find out more about how to use pigments, he visited shops that produced advertisements for billboards and observed how they mixed and applied the paint. "By the time I'd finished those paintings for Ko, I'd learned a lot about painting," he says. "You could say, that was the time when I taught myself to paint."
All that hard work established his reputation, laying a solid foundation for his future career. "Gradually, more and more filmmakers came to ask me to paint posters for them, and it was then that I decided to make it my lifetime's work," he says.
Taiwanese movies were popular in the fifties and sixties, and Chen quickly became very busy. "Nearly 90 percent of the posters for the more than 1,000 Taiwanese films shown during that period were painted by me," he claims proudly. Many theater owners pushed him for posters, which they would use to advertise their schedules in advance. Some filmmakers even asked him to produce posters before the movies were finished. "I worked day and night, but still couldn't satisfy their demands," he says. "Sometimes, people would camp in my studio, eating their lunch-boxes, just to make sure their posters got finished first. People stayed over in my house, some even brought cash to try to persuade me to work for them. But I was too busy to take on any more work. Companies occasionally had to wait more than two months to see the final drawing."
According to Chen, there were only about ten movie poster painters in Taipei at that time. "I don't know why people came to me," he says. "Perhaps because I didn't have any training in the field, the posters I painted were different from the rest. They had a special character." He has always paid special attention to light, using it to create three-dimensional effects, and to the proper arrangement of foreground and background. "In my posters, you see different depths of scene," he points out. "The close-up pops right out at you, then come the medium- and long-distance views."
Another striking feature distinguishing Chen's work from that of his competitors is that he can create a poster without knowing the storyline. All he needs to stimulate his imagination is the name of the movie and stills of the leading male and female actors. This skill evolved in the early days when he was simply overwhelmed with work, far too busy to watch the movies right through.
So, how does Chen do it? He sees the painting of a movie poster as creation, not imitation. "You have to decide what is the most important thing in the movie and make that the theme of the poster," he says. "It isn't necessary to paint the plot. It's no big deal if the poster isn't exactly in accordance with the scenes in the movie." As long as the poster can express the "feel" of the film, even the actors' costumes can be changed. A good poster should express itself in a simple style of eye-catching composition and clean lines. "The most important thing is to make it visually appealing," Chen says. "It doesn't have to be crammed with detail. Its job is to let people know what the movie is about the moment they set eyes on it."
Chen has also painted posters for Western and Japanese movies, and during the seventies he designed posters for numerous movies that had been adapted from the popular works of a famous romantic novelist called Chiung Yao (瓊瑤). But it was during the seventies' craze for movies based on historical tales of Chinese chivalry that Chen's poster-painting career reached its zenith. By then he was already a mature artist with a fully developed personal style. "My record was forty posters in a month," he says. "I could finish one within three hours, but in general I painted about 100 to 200 posters a year."
Posters for Chinese chivalry movies required a particular combination of action and strength motifs, which was Chen's forte. "They're my favorites," he confesses. "They suit my style: bold, clear-cut, and direct. When I'm doing those, each poster turns out excellent, totally the product of my creativity."
His poster for A Touch of Zen, a Chinese chivalry movie featuring legendary actress Hsu Feng (徐楓), is deemed one of his best works, and it enjoyed the unique distinction of traveling abroad to overseas screenings with the movie it advertised. It has been reprinted for international circulation many times.
Although Chen is especially good at Chinese chivalry movie posters, he feels that as far as atmosphere is concerned his best work was done for horror movies and dramas. In his horror movie posters, he does not actually try to reproduce ghosts and monsters. Rather, he aims for a certain "creepy" mood. "Posters aren't motion pictures," he says. "They're stills. Figures of ghosts and monsters don't necessarily make people feel terror. So what I try to do is bring out the inner feeling. I use very few colors on such posters, and the colors I do use tend to be weak."
When it comes to straightforward drama movies, however, Chen sticks to a simple principle: "The leading actress has to be painted to look beautiful and the male role must above all be handsome. People like good-lookers. If they see that the stars are attractive, they'll buy tickets."
Chen enjoys figure painting, and there are a lot more people than objects in his posters. "Painting figures is the best way to reveal the type of movie," he maintains. "From the eyes, facial expressions, and gestures of the portraits people can get an understanding of whether the movie is a comedy, a tragedy, a romance, or a realistic drama." But painting stars is not an easy skill. "The most difficult part is the eyes," he says, "and I pay great attention to that. If the eyes are dull, the poster is 'out.'"
In the early days of moviemaking, posters played a key role in promotion. "There were only two ways to let the public know what movies were showing, and where," Chen says. "One was noisy promotion cars cruising the streets, and the other was posters." And during the post-war period, when materials were in short supply, only three posters were created for each movie produced. "They were pasted up inside the theater," Chen recalls, "while outside there was just a billboard with the name of the movie being shown." Because the three posters had to travel with the film all over the island, they were painted on silk, which made for easier maintenance and repair.
Mass production only began to make an impact in the fifties, when Taiwan's movie business really started to get off the ground. As the economy improved, movie theaters hired their own poster artists to create advertising material. All kinds of posters and billboards began to appear, giving the cities a much livelier appearance than in the past.
Before the advent of photogravure and even more advanced printing processes, production of a poster was quite a laborious task. After Chen had finished painting the original on silk, a plate-maker had to trace it stroke by stroke, including any text, onto a master print, which was then sent to be colored in seven basic hues. But in this era of mass media, the public no longer needs to depend on posters to know what films are showing. Moreover, the depression in the local movie industry, starting in the late eighties, has made filmmakers reluctant to spend money on hiring artists to produce top-class posters. Chen is the first to admit that his profession is in decline, and two years ago he stopped painting movie posters. He now creates them by using all-photographic processes.
Nevertheless, Chen believes that the hand-painted posters of the past possess a sense of vividness that today's posters can never emulate. "Only painting can bring the imagination into full play while rendering the precise effect you intend to convey in the poster," he says.
To keep abreast of trends, he reads magazines and frequently travels abroad. Of all the countries he has visited, Italy has had the most profound influence on him. "Every poster they paint in Italy is a work of art," he says. "They inspired me a lot when I was creating my own posters." His style also varies in tune with social change. Hong Kong-made movies became very popular in the late eighties, and at that time his paintings began to develop more fluent, abstract lines, similar in style to cartoons.
Over the course of fifty years, not one of Chen's posters has ever been rejected. The 71-year-old painter is justifiably proud of that achievement, but what is perhaps even more amazing is that each and every one of his more than 5,000 original drawings has been carefully preserved, with some of them now in the Chinese Taipei Film Archive and the rest at the artist's studio. "My wife helped me preserve the posters," he explains. "She was concerned to let my children and grandchildren know what I had achieved."