Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein

Author:Eliot Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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Yan grew up the oldest of five children in the rolling farmland of Tainan County. In the mornings, he and his mother would leave their humble farmhouse to gather eggs from the family’s chickens and crops from their small plot. They’d sell them in a tiny orange kiosk outside their home alongside the fish and prawns Yan’s father had caught. Despite the family’s meager income and daily hardships, Yan remembers his mother as a loving woman. His father, however, was anything but. “He was a very strict man. He was brutal,” Yan said, as he sat surrounded by dozens of finished canvases from past billboards in his studio, directly above the outdoor area where he paints each day. “He used to tie me up and beat me. I was so scared of him that I used to hide under the bed to avoid any contact with him. Even after he passed away, I could not forgive him.”

Instead, Yan found an escape in art. He studied film posters in the local paper and tried to re-create them with a pencil in his bedroom. “That’s how my romance with movie posters began,” Yan said, momentarily making eye contact with me before quickly returning his gaze to the ground. “I even won third place in a painting competition in third grade. I was quite talented, I guess.”

Yan wasn’t one for school, though, and by the time he was 12, he decided that he had had enough. Instead, he spent his days wandering the countryside, catching grasshoppers and studying the way the shifting clouds shadowed the landscape. His favorite thing to do was to sneak into the two run-down theaters showing second-run films nearby, where he’d sometimes watch as many as seven movies a day before going home to sketch his favorite scenes. “The films were so blurry you could barely see them, so I used to imagine the characters,” Yan said, smiling. “Back then, all the movie theaters had hand-painted posters and each one had their own master.” When Yan was 18, he finally built up the courage to tell his parents that he wanted to pursue film painting. His mother encouraged him to follow his passion. His father chased him out of the house with a broom. “He said I’d starve,” Yan remembered. “And he was right.”

Yan’s aunt worked in downtown Tainan and knew someone in the movie poster industry who introduced Yan to Chen Feng-yun, one of southern Taiwan’s greatest billboard masters. Feng-yun agreed to allow Yan to apprentice under him. For the first two years, Yan earned the equivalent of $6 per month and couldn’t afford an apartment, so the homeless apprentice slept in a tiny crawl space under the theater’s steps that was too small for a bed. “I could only afford to eat soup and rice. Those were the toughest days. I was down to 39 kilograms, but I never considered failing. I knew that as long as you had a specialty, you could make a living.

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