Dafen village

Recently, I have frequently been reminded an urban village which located in Shenzhen, China—Dafen Village. It’s a world oil painting factory, the world’s leading center of mass-produced artwork and knockoffs of masterpieces. I have visited it 5 years ago and its development process is quiet similar to my project.

Dafen village was just a small fishing village inhabited by about 300 people nineteen years ago. In 1989, an art dealer from Hong Kong came to Dafen with his painting tools and several students. Now it called the cultural industry base of Shenzhen. There are more than 800 galleries and nearly 10,000 artists and workers in the village. They earned 380 million yuan selling oil paintings and peripheral products such as frames, palette and so on.

You can find reproductions of masterworks by Rembrandt, Titian, Picasso, Dali, and anyone else you might favor. An estimated 70 percent of the world’s most copied oil paintings are brushed up and spat out of this village. Many of those oil paintings that hang in hotel rooms and starter homes across America are actually produced by just this Chinese village.

In Dafen, oil paintings are commercial decorative produces more than art; and galleries are factories mort than studio. At the beginning, the way of copying was inefficient and caused many problems, because different people have different handwriting, different painters have different painting styles. Then, the art dealers got inspiration from the assembly lines in clothing and car factories. Every painter takes charge of only one part of a painting. For example, in a landscape painting, painter A only drew trees, painter B only drew rivers and painter C was only in charge of mixing colors. This way assured that all the paintings had the same colors and shapes, and accelerated the rate of production.

In recent years, copying masterpieces is no longer the preferred activity of Dafen galleries. More and more galleries in Dafen are producing their own paintings. It is becoming urgent for copy workers to grow into real artists. Now any painter who wants to work in Dafen has to pass an examination held by local labor bureau. What Dafen needs are artists who know how to create more than just copy.