Unavailable
Unavailable
Unavailable
Ebook590 pages10 hours
Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade
By Winnie Wong
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
In a manufacturing metropolis in south China lies Dafen, an urban village that famously houses thousands of workers who paint van Goghs, Da Vincis, Warhols, and other Western masterpieces for the world market, producing an astonishing five million paintings a year. To write about work and life in Dafen, Winnie Wong infiltrated this world, first investigating the work of conceptual artists who made projects there; then working as a dealer; apprenticing as a painter; surveying wholesalers and retailers in Europe, East Asia and North America; establishing relationships with local leaders; and organizing a conceptual art exhibition for the Shanghai World Expo. The result is Van Gogh on Demand, a fascinating book about a little-known aspect of the global art world—one that sheds surprising light on the workings of art, artists, and individual genius.
Confronting big questions about the definition of art, the ownership of an image, and the meaning of originality and imitation, Wong describes an art world in which idealistic migrant workers, lofty propaganda makers, savvy dealers, and international artists make up a global supply chain of art and creativity. She examines how Berlin-based conceptual artist Christian Jankowski, who collaborated with Dafen’s painters to reimagine the Dafen Art Museum, unwittingly appropriated the work of a Hong Kong-based photographer Michael Wolf. She recounts how Liu Ding, a Beijing-based conceptual artist, asked Dafen “assembly-line” painters to perform at the Guangzhou Triennial, neatly styling himself into a Dafen boss. Taking the Shenzhen-based photojournalist Yu Haibo’s award-winning photograph from the Amsterdam's World Press Photo organization, she finds and meets the Dafen painter pictured in it and traces his paintings back to an unlikely place in Amsterdam. Through such cases, Wong shows how Dafen’s painters force us to reexamine our preconceptions about creativity, and the role of Chinese workers in redefining global art.
Providing a valuable account of art practices in an ascendant China, Van Gogh on Demand is a rich and detailed look at the implications of a world that can offer countless copies of everything that has ever been called “art.”
Confronting big questions about the definition of art, the ownership of an image, and the meaning of originality and imitation, Wong describes an art world in which idealistic migrant workers, lofty propaganda makers, savvy dealers, and international artists make up a global supply chain of art and creativity. She examines how Berlin-based conceptual artist Christian Jankowski, who collaborated with Dafen’s painters to reimagine the Dafen Art Museum, unwittingly appropriated the work of a Hong Kong-based photographer Michael Wolf. She recounts how Liu Ding, a Beijing-based conceptual artist, asked Dafen “assembly-line” painters to perform at the Guangzhou Triennial, neatly styling himself into a Dafen boss. Taking the Shenzhen-based photojournalist Yu Haibo’s award-winning photograph from the Amsterdam's World Press Photo organization, she finds and meets the Dafen painter pictured in it and traces his paintings back to an unlikely place in Amsterdam. Through such cases, Wong shows how Dafen’s painters force us to reexamine our preconceptions about creativity, and the role of Chinese workers in redefining global art.
Providing a valuable account of art practices in an ascendant China, Van Gogh on Demand is a rich and detailed look at the implications of a world that can offer countless copies of everything that has ever been called “art.”
Unavailable
Related to Van Gogh on Demand
Related ebooks
Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLife on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNetwork Aesthetics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Airplane Reading Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPassing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsZolitude Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Made Uranium!: And Other True Stories from the University of Chicago's Extraordinary Scavenger Hunt Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Skinny Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTransCoding - From ›Highbrow Art‹ to Participatory Culture: Social Media - Art - Research Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThat Existential Leap: A Crime Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChildren and the Tundra Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Empress and the Cake Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fire Hides Everywhere Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSlanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hail, The Invisible Watchman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shakespeare's Sonnets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsImmediate Family: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Untold Story of the Talking Book Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Under the Broom Tree Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Social Science For You
All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Quick, & Magnetic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Close Encounters with Addiction Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Men Explain Things to Me Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verbal Judo, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (Oprah's Book Club Selection) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Denial of Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition: The Power of Radical Self-Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Human Condition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Questions for Couples: 469 Thought-Provoking Conversation Starters for Connecting, Building Trust, and Rekindling Intimacy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Reviews for Van Gogh on Demand
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Book about the painters of Dafen, who paint hundreds of thousands of canvases by hand. This is often reported as an “assembly line,” but as Wong documents there are really lots of small firms and the production is more craftlike, at least compared to real machine production. But Dafen has other meanings and is deeply embedded in both capitalist narratives and narratives about art and postmodernism. For example, one blogger described these paintings as “hand painted” “only in the sense that human beings actually handled them,” because the blogger didn’t consider the painters appropriately skilled. At the same time, Western high art has conferred authorial status on the “boss” who causes art to come into being (like Warhol) while denigrating the hands that actually did the physical work. Individuality is moved elsewhere, up the production chain; physical work becomes craft (or kitsch), a process enhanced and complicated by the relationship between art and the market. The relations between bosses and artisans in Dafen are constantly being negotiated, in at least partial defiance of the ideology of authenticity/creativity. Instead of being deskilled through division of labor, Dafen painters actually learn transferrable skills and work independently whenever possible. Though many outsiders, including Chinese outsiders, see Dafen as anti-true art, potential painters often come to Dafen because they believe in self-actualization through creative labor. Even painting for the trade isn’t necessarily copying inasmuch as the painters don’t feel tied to making exact copies of a specific original, but rather to the demands of the market; thus transformation, innovation, appropriation, and delegation are part of their practices as much as they’re part of the practices of Western “high” artists. Fidelity and copying are rarely terms on which their works are judged. Still, China’s government wants Dafen to be an example of emerging Chinese “creativity,” opposed to the presumed “copying” of current production practices. Wong makes the Foucauldian argument that these concepts actually produce each other, given the way in which they are related by officials and artists. (For example, the apotheosis of Chinese art is landscape painting—so the most artistic, deemed-creative artists get grants to go paint landscapes that have been painted hundreds of times before.) Wong also sets forth multiple overlapping divisions in Dafen’s own painters, who often define themselves as true artists versus some other group of Dafen painters. (I wish she’d talked more about gender; she often speaks of painters and their wives, but women are clearly doing a lot of the painting—part of the practice is that painters regularly get other people to do “their” work, and the commissioner doesn’t care as long as the timing and quality are right.) Dafen is profoundly unsettling, Wong suggests, because its existence indicates that there’s nothing van Gogh did that a farmer couldn’t also do, no true individuality as expressed in labor. At the same time, the social position of Dafen painters makes it difficult if not impossible for most of them to be recognized as “true” artists, because it’s individuality itself in the form of an authorial persona that must be produced with the consent of the art world.