Characters from the time-honored comic Old Master Q (老夫子) have made an unexpected return at Meilun Village (美崙), Pingtung County, where they are pictured across the walls of buildings in a local community where wall art is in vogue.
The craze for wall painting started when a Guatemala-based Taiwanese businesswoman, Chiu Chin-lan (邱錦蘭), returned to Meilun to open a coffee shop in a sanheyuan (三合院), a traditional three-section compound, last year after living in Guatemala for nearly three decades.
She adorned her cafe with a three-dimensional wall painting depicting a Guatemalan coastal scene, which helped catapult her shop to fame, Chiu said.
Photo: Lo Hsin-chen, Taipei Times
The practice immediately spread, with fellow villagers paying generously for a piece of art to embellish the walls of their house, and a local community association asking the county government to help refashion the village into a world of brightly painted walls.
Villagers secured the authorization to reproduce the characters of Old Master Q because the copyright owner and a creator of the comic, Shih Chien University architecture professor Joseph Chak Wong (王澤), is married to a woman from Meilun, artist Liao Shih-hsuan (廖士軒) said.
Wall after wall of paintings around the cafe are works by Liao and his father, Liao Chang-sheng (廖長生), the artists said.
The duo plan to cast well-known characters from comics such as Old Master Q, Big Potato (大番薯), Mr Chin (秦先生) and Miss Chan (陳小姐) in rural scenes typical of the county, with characters pictured fishing by a brook and hang-gliding across a field, they said, adding that their project is expected to be finished early this month.
Jhutian Township (竹田) Warden Fu Min-hsiung (傅民雄) said the township office is encouraging each village to develop its own unique character and he is glad that Meilun would be livened up with the vivid wall paintings of Old Master Q.
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