M.Age : Chinese village strikes oil
Uncle Yap
July 1, 2006
Chinese village strikes oil
By Mary-Anne Toy, Beijing
A gallery in Dafen, the world's biggest oil-painting village, where
artisan-painters can knock out their own impressionist masterpiece.
Photo: Andrew Taylor
DAFEN village, in the Shenzhen province of southern China, is an art
lover's dream — or nightmare — depending on your perspective.
Once a backwater of 300 farmers, Dafen is now the world's biggest "oil
painting village", where fast-food business principles are being
applied to art in a uniquely Chinese fashion.
For most young Australians, the first foray into the world of fine art
is the ubiquitous Van Gogh, Monet or Picasso print, bluetacked on to
the wall of a shared house.
For the price of a hamburger, Dafen's legion of 8000
"artisan-painters" can knock out your very own impressionist
masterpiece.
A Van Gogh "sunflowers" or "irises" can be bought for as little as 20
yuan ($A3.50), and cheaper by the dozen.
Dafen's enthusiastic army of "factory" painters collectively churn out
5 million oil paintings a year, worth 500 million yuan, or about 60
per cent of the world's production of oil paintings, according to
local officials.
Most are reproductions of Old Masters, 19th and 20th-century
modernists and the visual equivalent of muzak — "decorative" art,
Greek Isle and Venice landscapes, florals, animals and the occasional
still life.
Copies of contemporary Chinese art are also beginning to appear
alongside traditional Chinese paintings as prices for the former break
records at auction houses in New York and Hong Kong.
The buyers are mainly foreign wholesalers, big chain stores, smaller
galleries and individual clients.
At Yi Xin Gallery, one of the more than 600 galleries and associated
workshops and factories in and around Dafen, an exquisite reproduction
of a woman by a famous recently deceased Shanghai artist is yours for
less than 200 yuan, including the frame.
Napoleon on a rearing steed (signed "Bonaparte" in the corner) is a
hefty 600 yuan, but Mona Lisas are just 150 yuan. The eclectic
collection caters for the growing number of buyers with differing
tastes. Most exports go to North America and Europe, but sales to the
rest of Asia and within China are growing.
As China's prosperity and home ownership grows, mainland Chinese are
becoming enthusiastic "collectors".
"The Westerners buy the Chinese paintings, and the Chinese buy the
European paintings," says gallery manager Chen Wen Wou.
Angels and cherubs are particularly popular among his mainland
customers, he says. One of Dafen's biggest exporters, Shenzhen
Artlover Culture and Art Development, ships 80 to 100 containers of
oil paintings overseas every year — more than 300,000 pictures.
The company's 400 painters are mostly young, and include many
disabled, deaf and/or mute, painters who would otherwise have trouble
finding work.
Some are art school graduates, but others, such as Tang Zi Ling, 21,
are trained on the job. For Ms Tang, home is an 18-hour train ride
away in central Hunan province.
"I'm here because first I love art, but second, my father is a painter
and so he hopes that I can learn how to paint here," he says.
The "factory" in which Ms Tang works is on the third floor of a
nondescript building above the Dafen community health centre. At the
reception area, a film crew and dozens of hangers-on spill onto the
stairwell, while at the back rows and rows of young people labour
away, copying from photographs, postcards, art books and internet
print-outs.
The radio is playing, people are smoking, there is light, but no
breeze, through the big windows. A recruit stands in front of two rows
of identical canvasses with faint carbon-copied outlines of a still
life, destined for a coffee shop chain.
In the next row, a young, shirtless man nods away to his MP3 player as
he paints a trombone on each canvas, his contribution to a mixed
abstract of guitar, trombone and keyboards. Next to him a less
experienced painter dabs on background squares of orange and reds.
Others have already filled in the keyboard and guitar.
More experienced painters such as Wei Li Hui work on individual
commissions.
Clutching a photograph of a modern landscape sent in by a foreign
client, he explains that it will take almost the whole day to copy.
Depending on the complexity, he can paint up to 20 pictures a day, and
earns 1000-2000 yuan a month, plus bonuses.
Li Guan Lin, a painter, is deaf, and a one-man assembly line.
Artlover's employees are encouraged to paint original work in between
filling orders.
The original works are displayed in the gallery, and if it generates
an order, the painter gets a commission. Today Mr Li is using carbon
paper to trace the lines of his own abstract creation on to a
metre-high pile of canvases to fill an order for an Italian company.
He will later paint in the outlines.
A Hong Kong artist and budding entrepreneur, Huang Jiang started it
all when he moved to Dafen in 1989 with a plan to use the mainland's
pool of low-cost painters to produce art reproductions for export.
His success attracted others, and today the village, on the outskirts
of the Shenzhen special economic zone, next to Hong Kong, is lauded by
top leaders as a stellar example of "cultural industry".
Not content with cornering the mass market in fakes, some of the more
innovative galleries are trying to increase the number of original
products they offer.
This is partly driven by copyright infringement problems, experienced
by some of their foreign buyers, but it also reflects China's
ambitions to become more than just the world's factory
*************From Uncle Yap**************
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