The Painting of Evil

By chance, HSU Pao-ching, a struggling middle-aged artist, begins teaching inmates how to paint. He is astonished to meet CHOU Cheng-ting, an exceptionally talented young prisoner who creates moving works of abstract art. HSU convinces prison authorities to let him stage an exhibition of CHOU’s works so that the rest of the world can also experience the beauty of these paintings, never suspecting the public uproar it would cause. It turns out that CHOU was the perpetrator of a random killing incident a few years prior. Subjected to protests and vandalism, the exhibition is eventually forced to shut down after HSU is hospitalized by an assault. Not understanding why people are unable to view these works of art objectively, HSU decides to investigate CHOU’s past, visiting the scene of the crime, the families of the victims, and eventually CHOU’s hometown. There, HSU seeks out a place CHOU had once told him, a secret base from CHOU’s childhood with a painting on the wall — a painting said to have been the original source of the killer’s artistic inspiration…