Huang Yung-fu was born in 1924 in Taishan County, Guangdong Province, the eldest of four brothers and two sisters. He joined the National Revolutionary Army in 1946 to fight against the People's Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War. When the Nationalists lost the mainland in 1949, many of the defeated troops followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan. The government housed soldiers and their families in hundreds of dedicated military dependents' villages scattered across the island. These were meant to be temporary, but temporary became permanent. Decades passed. Veterans grew old in settlements that aged with them, their walls cracking, their roofs sagging, the world outside changing while the villages remained frozen in a postwar limbo.

As the military villages deteriorated, developers saw opportunity. Land was bought, residents were relocated, and entire neighborhoods vanished under new construction. Huang refused to leave. With no neighbors, no schedule, and nothing but empty houses around him, he began to paint. He had no formal training and no plan. The work was spontaneous, driven by instinct and isolation. Bright reds, yellows, greens, and blues covered walls that had known only concrete gray. Huang painted faces with wide eyes and wider grins, animals that belonged to no zoological category, flowers that bloomed in impossible combinations. The art was joyful, almost childlike, and it spread relentlessly across every available surface until the remaining 11 houses were saturated with color.

Local university students discovered what Huang had done and recognized it as something worth protecting. They launched a campaign to save the village from demolition, and the story caught public attention. Authorities eventually agreed that the site should be preserved as a designated cultural area. Rainbow Village became a tourist attraction, and Huang, by then well into his nineties, became known across Taiwan as Rainbow Grandpa. His story resonated far beyond the art itself: a man who had crossed the Taiwan Strait as a young soldier, spent decades in a forgotten settlement, and in his ninth decade found a way to make the world notice.

The story did not end neatly. A contract dispute led disgruntled workers to paint over many of Huang's original murals in protest after losing their jobs. Huang, by then too old to repaint, could only watch. After renovation, the village reopened in June 2023 with some of the damaged artwork restored and some areas repainted by other hands. Huang Yung-fu died in January 2024 at the age of 101. Rainbow Village today is not quite what it was. The spontaneity that made it extraordinary cannot be replicated, and the village carries the complicated legacy of a man whose art was born from loneliness and stubbornness in equal measure. The murals that survive remain vivid, defiant splashes of color against the encroaching concrete of a city that nearly swallowed them.