Larger than life

Yan Jhen-Fa has never met a film star, but he’s painted so many he can’t remember them all. Nearly every day for the last 48 years, the 66-year-old artist shuffles onto the pavement across from the Chin Men Theater in Taiwan’s oldest city, Tainan, holding a small image and five buckets of paint.

For the next eight hours, he squats on a plastic stool and kneels on the ground in his makeshift outdoor studio, using deft brush strokes to depict film legends in surreal, film noir-like friezes of suspense, passion or pride. When he finishes, he clambers up the scaffolding and uses rope to hoist the 20-sq-m canvases three storeys into the air to hang them on the theatre’s facade.

Today, the Chin Men is the only remaining theatre in Taiwan to continue the age-old tradition of displaying hand-painted film posters. And in an era of digital printing and computerised billboards, Yan is one of the last artists in the world carrying on a craft that’s on the verge of extinction.