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.
