Dafen Inc. World of Forgery and Macdonalds of the Art World
Chinese “urban village,” Dafen once produced an estimated 60 percent of all the world’s oil paintings.
During its heyday-when the village’s reputation as an art factory rang truer than today-it almost
exclusively cranked out copies of paintings in the Western art canon.
State of the Arts in China : .[Spoiler (click to open)]Coffee Version
Ten years ago, I met a Chinese coffee house owner who told me he was from the village of Dafen population of 500 in Shenzen China, before he came to Canada. He recently sold his coffee business here and moved back to China telling me that the place called Dafen Village in Shenzhen on the mainland just across from Hong Kong, is now part of a multi-million population city of Shenzen. Thousands of proficiently academically trained Chinese artists moved there for cheap rent. Now they can no longer afford to run their live in studios. It's now a suburb of Buji, Longgang, Shenzhen in the province of Guangdong, with a population of 17.56 million as of 2020 pre-covid : https://mapcarta.com/26348452
Other commercial artists in Canada complain that China is wont to reproduce their art pieces off the internet and sell them as artist prints, giving them no royalty, with no permission, no agreement, ie. theft of intellectual property. Ain't the internet grand!
Unfortunately, I never got to that level of notoriety to find out. Through the salon gallery, I did however to manage to sell about $100,000 worth of art by a local artist to a public gallery in China. They appraoched us looking for established Canadian artists, whom they could exclusively market. The lady who won the jackpot with her life work, has since passed away, probably from dealing with the stress of politics involved in cross-cultural ethics. In other words, they bought her. They own her. She sold more of her art in that one sale than through her life long career.
When she passed on as many of my older artist friends have, the family or estate is hard pressed what to do with a collection of lifelong artworks. In her case her son distributed some to family members and put the rest in storage. I've lost touch with him and have no idea what storage bin they dwell in. She painted from life every day and had about 5,000 canvases in her basement "almost finished" needing just a finishing touch and signature to sell them. She rivaled Van Gogh in her inventory, and her style is much like the Group of Seven, a well established genre here in Canada, by pioneers like Emily Carr, Tom Thompson and Lauren Harris. That was the appeal to the Chinese gallery owner. Yet in Canada, at local art shows, viewers think of them as sterotype worth a dime a dozen. Not so to Mr Wang!!
A friend I met in art school, also became commercially successful selling to an art seller from England who would come to Vancouver on buying trips and buy a dime a dozen. For a few grand, he would walk away with a half dozen of my friend Al's originals to sell back in England. Speculators exist, but they have to find you. I've never had that mentality with art. My sensibility lies in working with a client to create a unique and intimate idea. Something with personal meaning and purpose of lasting quality. So I am well aware of all levels of the art industry, including public museum collections, artist collectives, art co-ops, art auctions, fund-raisers, reproduction, group shows, etc. I've done it all. And come out worse for ware. In art you mostly need to focus on one thing and commodify yourself. I am too diverse to be accepted by any one art entity. My individual clients are the one's who benefit from the glory of the work. And that's the way I like it preferably.
So here's a story...
"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;-
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" - William Wordsworth
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us
Portrait Of Adele Bloch Bauer by Gustav Klimt - Frame Print on Canvas $1039/ Trip to China - priceless!!
In June of 2006, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder coughed up $135 million for what might be the highest
price ever paid for a 1907 Gustav Klimt original. He might easily have just bought a ticket to China!
In China, copyright means nothing. When asked do you have right-to-print, the Chinese simply say,
"Well, you didn't say we couldn't print it." Lawsuits have been attempted, with little result.
Dafen Village, Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province's Macdonalds of the Art World
The canvases found their way into hotel rooms, show homes, and furniture outlets all around the world.
Not bad for somewhere that until the late 1980s was a largely overlooked and decidedly rural backwater
on the periphery of Shenzhen, on China's mainland across from the prospering shipping port of Honk Kong.
The Walmart of Art Was Made in China - Dafen and Other Shitholes
Dafen (Chinese: 大芬; pinyin: Dàfēn; Jyutping: daai6 fan1) is a suburb of Buji, Longgang, Shenzhen, in the province of Guangdong, China. Since 1989, the area has been an artists' village for the production of replicas of masterworks and outsourcing of original art creation as a specialised urban cottage industry finding it's way into architectural and industrial real estate art distribution. Fakes by Wong from proficient artists, sell for a pittance on the dollar, a veritable Chinese sweat factory.
The southern portion of Bao'an County was seized by the British after the Opium Wars and became Hong Kong, while the village of Shenzhen was situated on the border. Due to the completion of a train station that was the last stop on the Mainland Chinese section of the railway between Guangzhou and Kowloon, Shenzhen's economy grew and became a market town and later a city by 1979, absorbing Bao'an County for the next decade. Kowboong !!
China Resources Headquarters Shenzhen Bay gymnasium in Nanshan District
An array of factors, which in many ways mirror the larger picture of rapid Chinese economic development, have converged to threaten Dafen’s long-term viability. Shenzhen proper was already a burgeoning Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a designation rolled out in the early 1980s as part of sweeping economic reforms that provide tax and business incentives in order to attract foreign investment. But in 1989, Dafen was positioned just outside of this lucrative region. Although later swallowed up by the expanding SEZ in 2010, at the time, Dafen quite literally sat at the gateway to the massive export economy on which modern-day China was built.
View from the Dafen Art Museum looking down the east side of the village. Photo: Adam Kuehl, Artsy
In 1989, the painter Huang Jiang started copying paintings and has since been considered the founder of Dafen's replica industry. In the early 1990s, a group of about twenty artists who trained at art academies took up residence under the leadership of businessman Huang Jiang. They produced dozens of replicas daily of oil paintings by masters such as Van Gogh, Dalí, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Warhol. In the 1990s, Huang sent a painting to Walmart and received an order of 50,000 paintings, which he had to produce within fourteen days.
An artist studio (with a copy of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon at the Great St. Bernard, 1801) and framing shop in Dafen: Photo Adam Kuehl
Dafen’s “artists” spend much of their time reproducing famous works like Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, for which you might expect to spend about $40 for a better-than-average copy.
View of Dafen Village’s kindergarten located in central square/ Artist studio in Dafen Photo Adam Kuehl, Artsy
Artist collective Chaospan Copy Painters work in a narrow alley between buildings on the east side of Dafen. Kuehl
The World’s Art Factory Is in Jeopardy/ Photos, Adam Kuehl, Artsy : .artsy.net
BTW, there are two Macdonalds just down the road...
The world's biggest art factory :
Inside the Chinese village where thousands of artists recreate iconic paintings for sale overseas
Damn Nang : .via
dr. π (pi)
.
During its heyday-when the village’s reputation as an art factory rang truer than today-it almost
exclusively cranked out copies of paintings in the Western art canon.
State of the Arts in China : .[Spoiler (click to open)]Coffee Version
Ten years ago, I met a Chinese coffee house owner who told me he was from the village of Dafen population of 500 in Shenzen China, before he came to Canada. He recently sold his coffee business here and moved back to China telling me that the place called Dafen Village in Shenzhen on the mainland just across from Hong Kong, is now part of a multi-million population city of Shenzen. Thousands of proficiently academically trained Chinese artists moved there for cheap rent. Now they can no longer afford to run their live in studios. It's now a suburb of Buji, Longgang, Shenzhen in the province of Guangdong, with a population of 17.56 million as of 2020 pre-covid : https://mapcarta.com/26348452
Other commercial artists in Canada complain that China is wont to reproduce their art pieces off the internet and sell them as artist prints, giving them no royalty, with no permission, no agreement, ie. theft of intellectual property. Ain't the internet grand!
Unfortunately, I never got to that level of notoriety to find out. Through the salon gallery, I did however to manage to sell about $100,000 worth of art by a local artist to a public gallery in China. They appraoched us looking for established Canadian artists, whom they could exclusively market. The lady who won the jackpot with her life work, has since passed away, probably from dealing with the stress of politics involved in cross-cultural ethics. In other words, they bought her. They own her. She sold more of her art in that one sale than through her life long career.
When she passed on as many of my older artist friends have, the family or estate is hard pressed what to do with a collection of lifelong artworks. In her case her son distributed some to family members and put the rest in storage. I've lost touch with him and have no idea what storage bin they dwell in. She painted from life every day and had about 5,000 canvases in her basement "almost finished" needing just a finishing touch and signature to sell them. She rivaled Van Gogh in her inventory, and her style is much like the Group of Seven, a well established genre here in Canada, by pioneers like Emily Carr, Tom Thompson and Lauren Harris. That was the appeal to the Chinese gallery owner. Yet in Canada, at local art shows, viewers think of them as sterotype worth a dime a dozen. Not so to Mr Wang!!
A friend I met in art school, also became commercially successful selling to an art seller from England who would come to Vancouver on buying trips and buy a dime a dozen. For a few grand, he would walk away with a half dozen of my friend Al's originals to sell back in England. Speculators exist, but they have to find you. I've never had that mentality with art. My sensibility lies in working with a client to create a unique and intimate idea. Something with personal meaning and purpose of lasting quality. So I am well aware of all levels of the art industry, including public museum collections, artist collectives, art co-ops, art auctions, fund-raisers, reproduction, group shows, etc. I've done it all. And come out worse for ware. In art you mostly need to focus on one thing and commodify yourself. I am too diverse to be accepted by any one art entity. My individual clients are the one's who benefit from the glory of the work. And that's the way I like it preferably.
So here's a story...
"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;-
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" - William Wordsworth
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us
Portrait Of Adele Bloch Bauer by Gustav Klimt - Frame Print on Canvas $1039/ Trip to China - priceless!!
In June of 2006, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder coughed up $135 million for what might be the highest
price ever paid for a 1907 Gustav Klimt original. He might easily have just bought a ticket to China!
In China, copyright means nothing. When asked do you have right-to-print, the Chinese simply say,
"Well, you didn't say we couldn't print it." Lawsuits have been attempted, with little result.
Dafen Village, Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province's Macdonalds of the Art World
The canvases found their way into hotel rooms, show homes, and furniture outlets all around the world.
Not bad for somewhere that until the late 1980s was a largely overlooked and decidedly rural backwater
on the periphery of Shenzhen, on China's mainland across from the prospering shipping port of Honk Kong.
The Walmart of Art Was Made in China - Dafen and Other Shitholes
Dafen (Chinese: 大芬; pinyin: Dàfēn; Jyutping: daai6 fan1) is a suburb of Buji, Longgang, Shenzhen, in the province of Guangdong, China. Since 1989, the area has been an artists' village for the production of replicas of masterworks and outsourcing of original art creation as a specialised urban cottage industry finding it's way into architectural and industrial real estate art distribution. Fakes by Wong from proficient artists, sell for a pittance on the dollar, a veritable Chinese sweat factory.
The southern portion of Bao'an County was seized by the British after the Opium Wars and became Hong Kong, while the village of Shenzhen was situated on the border. Due to the completion of a train station that was the last stop on the Mainland Chinese section of the railway between Guangzhou and Kowloon, Shenzhen's economy grew and became a market town and later a city by 1979, absorbing Bao'an County for the next decade. Kowboong !!
China Resources Headquarters Shenzhen Bay gymnasium in Nanshan District
An array of factors, which in many ways mirror the larger picture of rapid Chinese economic development, have converged to threaten Dafen’s long-term viability. Shenzhen proper was already a burgeoning Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a designation rolled out in the early 1980s as part of sweeping economic reforms that provide tax and business incentives in order to attract foreign investment. But in 1989, Dafen was positioned just outside of this lucrative region. Although later swallowed up by the expanding SEZ in 2010, at the time, Dafen quite literally sat at the gateway to the massive export economy on which modern-day China was built.
View from the Dafen Art Museum looking down the east side of the village. Photo: Adam Kuehl, Artsy
In 1989, the painter Huang Jiang started copying paintings and has since been considered the founder of Dafen's replica industry. In the early 1990s, a group of about twenty artists who trained at art academies took up residence under the leadership of businessman Huang Jiang. They produced dozens of replicas daily of oil paintings by masters such as Van Gogh, Dalí, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Warhol. In the 1990s, Huang sent a painting to Walmart and received an order of 50,000 paintings, which he had to produce within fourteen days.
An artist studio (with a copy of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon at the Great St. Bernard, 1801) and framing shop in Dafen: Photo Adam Kuehl
Dafen’s “artists” spend much of their time reproducing famous works like Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, for which you might expect to spend about $40 for a better-than-average copy.
View of Dafen Village’s kindergarten located in central square/ Artist studio in Dafen Photo Adam Kuehl, Artsy
Artist collective Chaospan Copy Painters work in a narrow alley between buildings on the east side of Dafen. Kuehl
The World’s Art Factory Is in Jeopardy/ Photos, Adam Kuehl, Artsy : .artsy.net
BTW, there are two Macdonalds just down the road...
The world's biggest art factory :
Inside the Chinese village where thousands of artists recreate iconic paintings for sale overseas
Damn Nang : .via
dr. π (pi)
.