Dali House

How China ensures the world an unending supply of art

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and every one of them who’s any good with a paintbrush works in a squashed little tenement of a “village” called Dafen, actually a hemmed-in suburb of Shenzhen, just across the former border from Hong Kong.

Okay, not every Chinese painter works in Dafen, but upwards of 10,000 do, and their nefarious work is churning out copy after copy after copy of famous artworks. The factories in this four-square-kilometre wedge of a settlement produces five million oil paintings a year for the European and American markets, 90 per cent of them copies.

I have no idea how they manage copyright and licensing.

Martin Paetsch had a rummage around Dafen for Der Spiegel magazine in August and struggled to rein in his incredulity.

Visitors come from all over to see the art colony, most of whose residents live in bunches in cramped flats that double as studios, their kids crawling around beneath draperies of drying canvases.

Occasionally there’s a facsimile competition, with 100 or more painters all racing to see who can finish a copy of the same portrait or landscape the fastest. The quickest of the Dafen artisans can complete up to 30 paintings a day.

William Bouguereau used reverent restraint in his “Virgin and Child”, but in China the lad, and the layout, are much more upbeat.

You know you’ve found Dafen when you spot a huge bronze hand holding a paintbrush at the entrance, and Michelangelo’s David stands outside the Dafen Louvre, a mall of booths selling paintings to tourists.

The Chinese government is outright boastful about the global financial success of this little “special aesthetic region”, founded in 1989, calling Dafen an “important cultural industry”. Such is culture today in the kingdom of a thousand dynasties.

Huang Jiang was the first businessman to make a fortune here from the copy market, but his former employees have since copied him and done even better. Wu Ruiqiu’s company, Shenzhen Artlover, ships 300,000 paintings a year, all fresh from assembly lines that represent Wu’s drive to “get into the business of oil paintings the way McDonald’s got into the business of fast food”, as he told Paetsch.

You can check out the firm’s products here or at its own, fancier site here. Either way you’ll see some fairly impressive copies alongside some godawful ones, but typically buyers are promised as many as “20,000pcs/month”, delivery within 20 days, on minimum orders of “50pcs/picture”.

Do not be shocked to see pages of reproductions with the original artist’s name nowhere in sight. Picasso and Da Vinci will just have to complain to their agents.

A bargain “Bonaparte” (the larger one), and not bad at all – just don’t tell Jacques Louis David.

Graduates of the top Chinese art academies are regularly recruited, and can command more than $1,000 per painting, though they’re not expected to work fast. But the professional copyists can always be counted upon to whip up a made-to-order work – perhaps your girlfriend’s face on a Mona Lisa, or you, sir, astride Napoleon’s horse? Only $15, or $5 if you buy 100 copies for your friends.

Paetsch watched as one man, working from a photograph, created a forest scene on two separate canvases simultaneously with a few flicks of the brush. “When a large order arrives he may have to paint the same motif 1,000 times.” He earns $350 in a good month, a helluva lot more than the original impressionists.

Asked if he ever paints an original, the artist said that if he were allowed to paint whatever he wanted, he’d run out of ideas in no time.

Below, Dafen as seen on Google Earth.