Dafen oil picture village: The world’s art factory

Reproducing works by eminent artists is mountainous industry, and for higher than 20 years, Dafen oil picture village in southern China has been at the centre of the worldwide replace in art reproductions.

Identified as the « world’s oil picture factory », in its heyday Dafen produced 60 percent of all unique oil work on hand worldwide, though this discipline has declined quite for the explanation that 2008 global financial crisis.

A suburb of Shenzhen in China’s Guangdong province, Dafen turn into associated to oil picture in the leisurely Nineteen Eighties when Huang Jiang, a painter and businessman from Hong Kong, took up discipline in the village.

Huang brought with him a band of painters and art students who began reproducing works by eminent Western artists much like Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt for the worldwide market.

The work had been bought by a unfold of clients – from outlets, hotels and convention centres to private collectors and gallery owners – and the village soon turn into into a bustling metropolis.

Residents on the total expend, sleep and paint in a single room [Haibo Yu/Kiki Tianqi Yu]

This present day, around eight,000 individuals dwell in Dafen, including artists, physique makers, agents, and their households. 

There might be little distinction between home and the place of job, with one room serving as a studio, bedroom, playroom and work hung up subsequent to dresses in exterior areas.

Dafen has became a tourist destination for those wanting to salvage their arms on a mock-masterpiece or leer how art is produced on an industrial scale.

Some workshops even use an assembly line-model design, with each and every artist picture a shrimp fragment of a much bigger piece, much like a tree or an behold, outdated to passing the picture on.

For some, studying and copying the realm’s greatest artists is a capability out of rural poverty; individuals that arrangement successful industry links are ready to desire on apprentices and open their very have galleries in the village, however the replica industry is by no means stable.

Competition is fierce and artists in Dafen promote their work for comparatively low prices, on the total to gallery owners who resell the determine of the nation at a mighty increased tag.

Within the closing decade, on the different hand, replace has been sweeping thru Dafen in more techniques than one.

When the worldwide financial crisis struck in 2008, many in Dafen had been compelled to not most piquant get unique clients as Western keep a query to declined however also, in some cases, to utterly replace their form of picture.

Rich domestic traders sought pieces that mirrored their very have tradition, prompting an lengthen in Dafen’s production of Chinese language plant life and portraits of cultural icons, much like Mao Zedong.

Within the wake of those adjustments, some artists had been laid off and needed to dwelling up studios in alleyways due to rising rent and a lack of establish. 

Development also poses a threat to artists’ livelihoods. Native executive maintain proposed a thought to capitalise on Dafen’s allure as a tourist destination by turning the village into an art park – weeding out many constructions at the 2nd occupied by painters in the technique.

In Would per chance perhaps presumably 2017, the Shenzhen executive issued an announcement citing 148 websites in Dafen as « extreme fireplace hazards ». That summer time, a local neighbourhood committee despatched representatives to clear the fireplace safety hazards, mighty to the concern of residents who saw their workplaces destroyed.

Nonetheless not all replace has been unfavourable. An rising quantity maintain begun the utilization of the abilities they’ve learned from producing replicas to arrangement their very have art work, alongside their reproduction work.

Whereas Dafen and its artists maintain successfully adapted to live to insist the tale a raft of global, local and private challenges, the arrangement in which forward for this strange village and its inhabitants remains in quiz.