An intent Jackie Chan, eyes all action-hero serious, stares at you from above … looking incredibly tall for someone so petite. Then again, having your likeness painted on an 11.8m-by-4.8m canvas tends to have that effect.

Remember the days when we were entranced by massive hand-painted movie posters outside local cinemas? To a child growing up in the ’80s, the hand-painted movie murals were the billboard equivalents of dinosaurs. These super-sized depictions of our film heroes, like the beautiful warrior goddess Lin Ching-hsia all decked out in her wuxia outfits, often seemed the larger-than-life reason why we were lured to the cinema in the first place.

But just as the dinosaurs were killed by the Ice Age, the Mouse Age – the one attached to the computer, that is – has all but killed off the artists behind these works of cinematic art.

Neo Chon Teck, 58, agrees that the modern digital poster reprints we see in cinemas today is of “better quality”. However, “the movie murals are more sentimental and precious, since they were all hand-painted”, he said.

The man should know. After all, the silver-haired, bespectacled Neo used to be one of a dozen or so traditional movie canvas painters for the various cinemas in Singapore. Unfortunately, the soft-spoken painter is part of a dying, if not almost dead, breed in this movie-mad country.

The grandfather of two spoke to Today at his three bedroom flat in Telok Blangah, sharing that he started painting when he was 16, a mere lad fresh out from school. In 1965, he trained to be a copy artist under a master from Yang Guang Studios, which eventually closed down in 1985. “I took some art classes in the beginning but I am more or less self-taught,” he said in Mandarin. “The company that I worked for had around five to six of us painting these posters. Now, there’s only me left. Or at least, that I know of.”

Channel News Asia