Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade

By Winnie Wong

“Unsettles contemporary art’s unspoken hierarchies and topples modernist and postmodernist assumptions about originality, authenticity, and authorship.” —caa Reviews

In a metropolis in south China lies Dafen, an urban village that 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. Winnie Wong infiltrated this world, first investigating the work of conceptual artists; 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.

Wong describes an art world in which migrant workers, propaganda makers, dealers, and international artists make up a global supply chain of art. 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, styling himself into a Dafen boss. Through such cases, Wong shows how Dafen’s painters force us to reexamine our preconceptions about the role of Chinese workers in redefining global art.

“[A] fantastically detailed exploration of a topic which touches the heart of many of the issues surrounding China's economic rise.” —South China Morning Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9780226024929

Book preview

Winnie Won Yin Wong is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02475-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02489-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02492-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/9780226024929

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wong, Winnie Won Yin.

Van Gogh on demand : China and the readymade / Winnie Won Yin Wong.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-02475-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-02489-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-02492-9 (e-book) 1. Art—China—Shenzhen Shi—Reproduction. 2. Art copyists—China—Shenzhen Shi. 3. Art, Modern—21st century. 4. Aesthetics, Modern—21st century. 5. Art—Reproduction. 6. Art—Economic aspects. 7. Rural-urban migration—China—Beijing. 8. Cultural industries—China. 9. City planning—China—Shenzhen Shi. I. Title.

N8580.W66 2013

751.509512'7—dc23

2013014449

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Van Gogh on Demand

CHINA AND THE READYMADE

Winnie

Won Yin Wong

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Dan, for Bonnie and Vicky, for Bill, Vivian, and for Wilson

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction After the Copy

Chapter One Imagining the Great Painting Factory

Chapter Two The Conceptual Artist and the Copyist Painter

Chapter Three True Art and True Love in the Model Bohemia

Chapter Four Step 18: Sign Vincent

Chapter Five Framed Authors: Conceptualism and the Dafen Readymade

Conclusion Conceptual Painting, China Dreams

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Glossary

List of Chinese Names

Notes

Sources

Index

Color Plates

Illustrations

MAP

Dafen village

FIGURES

0.1   2004 Dafen Copying Competition

0.2   Ilya Repin, Portrait of Vladimir Stasov

0.3   Empfangshalle and Thomas Adebahr, The Benjamin Project

0.4   Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’…

0.5   Dafen bookshop

1.1   Two apprentices at work in a Dafen studio

1.2   Portrait of Huang Jiang

1.3   Christian Jankowski, The First Painter of Dafen Village

1.4   Dafen village, c. 1978

1.5   Workers in the factory of Shenzhen ArtLover

1.6   Painters in the factory of Noah Art

1.7   Oil painting over a digitally printed draft, in progress

1.8   Luo Zhijiang in his studio

1.9   Liu Ding, Products—Samples from the Transition

2.1   Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life

2.2   Zhao Xiaoyong as Vincent Van Gogh in Sascha Pohle, Reframing the Artist

2.3   Penelope Cruz as Maria Elena in Vicky Christina Barcelona

2.4   Jia Jia as Maria Elena in Sascha Pohle, Reframing the Artist

2.5   Anthony Hopkins as Pablo Picasso in Surviving Picasso

2.6   Qin Xiaobin as Pablo Picasso in Sascha Pohle, Reframing the Artist

2.7   John Baldessari, Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell

2.8   Student exercises in fundamental skills

3.1   Dafen village, 2008

4.1   Van Gogh’s Sunflowers from Dafen village

4.2   Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, signed by Seelong

4.3   Zhao Xiaoyong, Van Gogh Goes to Work

4.4   Zhao Xiaoyong, preparatory sketch for Van Gogh Goes to Work

4.5   Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, signed by Seelong

4.6   Signature of A. Klang, detail from Tu m’…

4.7   Signature of Marcel Duchamp, detail from Tu m’…

4.8   Liu Ding, Liu Ding’s Store—Take Home and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart

4.9   Liu Ding, Liu Ding’s Store—Take Home and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart

5.1   Christian Jankowski, Inner Landscape of Museum Director

5.2   Christian Jankowski, Liberty

c.1   Shenzhen Case Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo, 2010

c.2   Dafen Lisa, in progress

c.3   Painted pixel of the Dafen Lisa

c.4   Dafen Lisa, at Shenzhen Case Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo, 2010

c.5   Shenzhen Case Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo, 2010

c.6   Painted pixel of the Dafen Lisa, reverse side

c.7   Jiang Qingbei, The Story of Dafen Village

c.8   Song Dong, 100 Years Project: 1962, Lei Feng & Marilyn Monroe

c.9   Song Dong, 100 Years Project: 1974, Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha & Terracotta soldiers

c.10   Shi Fei, Untitled

COLOR PLATES

Plates follow Chapter 2.

1   Palette and workstation of a van Gogh painter

2   Liu Ding, Products—Samples from the Transition

3   Sascha Pohle, Reframing the Artist

4   Leung Meeping, Made in Hong Kong/Shenzhen

5   Workstation of Ye Xinle

6   Sascha Pohle, Reframing the Artist

7   How to Paint van Gogh’s Sunflowers

8   Standard products of Zhao Xiaoyong’s shop

9   Portrait of Zhao Xiaoyong

10   Zhao Xiaoyong’s workshop

11   Liang Yiwoo, Woman x Work

12   John C. Gonzalez, Self-Portrait #12, Mo Jiehui

13   Michael Wolf, Real Fake Art

14   Christian Jankowski, China Painters

15   Christian Jankowski, Museum Director’s Chair

16   Michael Wolf, Real Fake Art, Lee Friedlander $13

17   Michael Wolf, Real Fake Art, Gerhard Richter €80

18   Portrait of Yin Xunzhi

19   Michael Wolf, Real Fake Art, On Kawara $4.50

20   Portrait of Yin Xunzhi

21   Michael Wolf, Real Fake Art, Neo Rauch €130

22   Portrait of Yin Xunzhi

23   Michael Wolf, Broken Chair

24   Cameron Gray, After Roy Lichtenstein’s Spray

25   Valio Tchenkov, Smuggle

26   Matthias Meinharter and Nikolaus Gansterer, Chinese Whispers

27   Yin Xunzhi, Big Chair

Dafen village, Buji Street office, Longgang district, Shenzhen, China.

中国广东省深圳市龙岗区布吉街道办事处大芬村.

Introduction

After the Copy

THE IRONIC COPY

In 2004, on the occasion of its designation as a national model cultural industry, Chinese officials held a Copying Competition in Dafen village. Located on the outskirts of the southern Chinese megacity of Shenzhen, Dafen village was being promoted by the city’s officials as the world’s largest production center for handmade oil paintings. Countering accusations that this art industry brazenly violated Western artists’ copyrights by forging their masterpieces, these officials argued instead that, through Chinese painters’ skills of imitation, the high art of the world had been democratized for global consumers. The Copying Competition was a celebratory spectacle of this ambition, held in Dafen village’s newly built outdoor Art Square as part of China’s First International Cultural Industry Fair, an event overseen at the highest levels of the Chinese national cultural administration.¹ During the contest, 110 painters competed to make the best copy of a painting in under three and a half hours (figure 0.1). The painting, chosen by a jury of Shenzhen artists appointed by the subdistrict-level propaganda department, was a portrait of the eminent nineteenth-century Russian art critic Vladimir Stasov, painted in 1883 by Ilya Repin, a Russian artist venerated for his progressive consciousness (figure 0.2).² The painters’ finished copies were judged, and ten painters were awarded cash prizes and the coveted opportunity to obtain urban household registration in Shenzhen.³

Since 1979 and the onset of China’s market reforms, urban household registration (hukou) has offered great advantages in the new socioeconomic regime. An institution that once regulated rural and urban differences under the planned economy, even under present-day reforms, household registration has continued to determine a Chinese citizen’s access to education, formal employment, medical care, police protection, the right to purchase property, and more. For the rural-born, transferring household registration was nearly impossible, thus rendering precarious the status of millions of rural migrants who work in the rapidly industrializing cities. Nearly all of Dafen village’s 8,000 painters were among this massive and illicit floating population, for whom urban household registration might solve a myriad of social inequities.

0.1

The 2004 Dafen Copying Competition for the First China International Cultural Industry Fair. Photo by Dafen Oil Painting Village Management Office.

0.2

Ilya Repin, Portrait of Vladimir Stasov, oil on canvas, 74 × 60 cm, 1883. Coll. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

In the early years of the reform era, moreover, household registration in the brand new city of Shenzhen was especially coveted, for Shenzhen was the utopia of post-Mao China, the city painted into existence by the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.⁴ Deng was said to have once drawn a circle on a map designating an area on the southern border of the nation where China would establish Shenzhen as its first Special Economic Zone. This legendary tale was retold in a 1994 propaganda song, whose lyrics credited China’s miraculous growth to that single calligraphic gesture.⁵ On the edge of that drawn circle emerged Dafen village, where thousands of Chinese painters were producing millions of Western paintings for the world market. A fairy tale vision of art, free market, and Chinese globalization would seem indeed to have been realized.

In addition to its stunning economic achievements that were so representative of China’s breakneck development, the city of Shenzhen thus also aspired to take up the cultural flank of the reform and opening policy, serving as the civilizational front line in the nation’s effort to join tracks with the rest of the world. This desire was splendidly displayed in the city’s most famous tourist attraction, Window of the World, a forty-eight-hectare theme park containing 130 scaled replicas of the world’s cultural landmarks, radially arranged around a 1:3 reproduction of the Eiffel Tower. Built in 1994, the park first served as a world culture primer for China’s political elite. By the time of the Dafen Copying Competition ten years later, the former farmers of Shenzhen had vacationed in Europe several times over, and Window of the World was only one of many middle-class amusement parks in the city.⁶

While the promises of postsocialist plenty and cosmopolitan mobility had been fulfilled for so many in Shenzhen, the plight of migrant workers in Dafen village—those rural migrants capable of painting the world’s masterpieces but without hope of visiting them in the original—remained a poignant reminder of the inequities of China’s reform era. Shenzhen journalists called for a resolution to Dafen painters’ unequal status, and the Shenzhen Labour Bureau announced it would provide urban household registration for those painters who could demonstrate sufficient professional qualifications.⁷ The top ten winners of the 2004 Copying Competition were then invited to sit for additional sketching and art history exams, and those who passed were rewarded with urban status in 2005.⁸ Over the next three years, the Copying Competition and professional examination were held annually, and over one hundred Dafen painters would qualify.⁹ These painters became full urban citizens—able to live, work, and travel in the city, to send their children to urban schools, and to vote in the elections of the village corporation.¹⁰

Ilya Repin’s Portrait of Vladimir Stasov would seem an appropriate choice for the inauguration of a labor policy that would integrate the city’s social and cultural ideals with its ongoing urbanization. In China, Repin (1844–1930) is widely exalted for his socialist and revolutionary consciousness, and is recognized as a painter of critical realism who utilized close observation and depiction of the disenfranchised to effect social change. His representative work, well known in China, is Burlaks on the Volga, a monumental 1873 painting that depicts the misery of landless peasants who worked as boat haulers along the banks of the Volga River. In the late nineteenth-century, the art critic Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906) championed Repin for taking up authentic Russian subject matter instead of the artistic fashions of Western Europe.¹¹ Stasov’s interpretation of Repin was mythologized by the Soviet arts system, which made both men into exemplars of national artistic achievement.¹² By choosing Repin’s Stasov for the Copying Competition, Dafen village’s propaganda officials thus safely associated their new cultural-economic project with an unimpeachable socialist artist. At the same time, in selecting a pre-revolutionary Russian artist’s portrait of a Russian critic who championed a Russian national style, they were also asserting Dafen village’s mastery of world culture.

But by 2004, the Chinese party-state’s claims of allegiance to the worker and the artist—the two class types unified in the figure of the Dafen painter—seemed only to demonstrate the bureaucratic power of what the Chinese art historian Julia Andrews has called the empty shell of the socialist art establishment.¹³ Because by then, the special ideological status of the socialist artist had been eroded not only by fast-evolving market reforms, but also by the rise in China throughout the 1980s and 1990s of Western collectors and curators, for whom the autonomy of the artist from the state was taken for granted as part and parcel of the avant-garde’s originality. Through the challenge wrought by the Western art market and the later efforts of Chinese art institutions to embrace this new cultural economy, the exalted political role of artists in socialist life had all but been evacuated of its idealism. To win the Dafen Copying Competition would hardly provide the Dafen painter with the kind of social relevance a celebrated artist might have once expected in the past, for the ability to paint a painting with a socialist consciousness had uncertain—if any—value in the new socialist market economy. Instead of symbolizing an uplifting socialist cultural achievement and a redistribution of socioeconomic benefits, the choice of Repin’s Stasov for a Copying Competition could, from this perspective, be little more than a backwards-looking publicity stunt or a cynical bureaucrat’s inside joke: a socialist statement in a postsocialist age.

From the perspective of cultural elites in both China and the West, then, it would be the belatedness of resurrecting Repin’s Stasov that would be the most remarkable aspect of Dafen’s Copying Competition. The collective and timed reproduction of a nineteenth-century socialist realist painting for a local, and very low-level, Communist Party propaganda organ would seem to even naively celebrate what Clement Greenberg had mocked long ago, when he controversially called Repin’s paintings kitsch and a form of state indoctrination of peasants in the Soviet bloc.¹⁴ Instead of appearing like pioneers of worldly progress and artistic achievement, Dafen’s officials would from that perspective seem doubly anachronistic: purveyors of Soviet propaganda for the kitsch market, and even then, only long after this Cold War rhetoric had been discredited. So when, in 2009, the Ilya Repin State Institute of Painting of St. Petersburg announced a five-year cultural exchange program with the same Shenzhen Cultural Industry Fair, promising to exhibit a minimum of 150 paintings per year from Russia that the city would henceforth promote and sell, it would seem that the alliance between the international socialist art establishment and the cultural industry run by the Chinese party-state had achieved yet greater heights of irony.¹⁵ And when, during the summer of 2011 and the national celebrations for the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, some Dafen galleries were displaying gigantic portraits of Joseph Stalin for sale, who would not hope that its apparent popularity was but a tongue-in-cheek comment on the official revival of socialist culture?

Dafen Oil Painting Village, the world’s largest production center for hand-painted art, China’s model art industry, and the Western retailer’s best source for oil reproductions of Western masterpieces, would seem to exemplify the ready ironies of China’s global ascendance. This book, however, aims to show that such ironies are sustained by an equally homogeneous image of Western modernism, one in which globalization is reduced to Cold War American triumphalism, and in which the socialist modern legacy is most glaringly forgotten. Through artistic events and productions such as the Copying Competition, I show in these pages that, when we delight in the apparent anachronisms of contemporary China, or imagine its citizens as ignorant victims of historical progress, we miss a far more compelling and complex drama. Tellingly, for example, at the 2004 fair, Dafen’s officials were in fact showcasing copying (linmo) only to contrast it with original creation (yuanchuang). Hence, after 110 painters had competed in the Copying Competition, officials had 1,100 painters line the streets of Dafen village to each paint an original painting of their own.¹⁶ In other words, though the Copying Competition would seem to glorify the skill of China’s copyists, this was but a sideshow to the much larger celebration of their individual creativity. This official emphasis on originality would soon come to be the driving force of governmental investment and attention to Dafen, visibly drawing the village into national and international policy discourses on creative industry. And even if we were to consign Dafen’s copies to the dustbin of a receding socialist past—one of officialdom and bureaucratically produced art, we would still be left with some inconvenient truths: for the demand for masterpiece copies that fueled Dafen village’s 300 million yuan (US$ 43 million) annual revenues originated neither in China nor its government, but rather in the vast consumer market of free and capitalist United States and Western Europe, where an estimated 90% of Dafen’s paintings were ultimately exported. The ironic mode of reception, in other words, only affirms that belatedness is in the eye of the beholder.

Like so many phenomena in post-Mao China, the Dafen Copying Competition and its appropriation of Repin’s Stasov appears at first blush to be surreal, absurd, and almost tragicomic. Glimpsed in this single event are inklings of the seemingly vast differences between contemporary China and the West. Just as the Chinese seem to dramatically misuse Repin, so too do Westerners seem primed to misunderstand the complexity underlying such a use. Dafen village, either the height of irony or the height of peasant achievement, speaks then to the growing perplexity of Sino-Western cultural relations and of the need to recognize the agency of Chinese institutions and individuals engaged in a renewed and ongoing production of aesthetic progress. Do China’s highly productive uses of Western history and culture lay claim to an alternative modernist legacy—Western art history (or socialism, or capitalism) with Chinese characteristics? Or does it in fact represent a broader, and even universal, fulfillment of modernism’s most avant-garde ideals?

Pausing substantially and skeptically over such mutually exclusive meta-narratives, this study charts the crossroads of modernist progress and postmodernist return represented by the juxtaposition of Dafen’s hand-painted art products against Eurocentric narratives of modern and contemporary art. To do so, it provides an account of China’s appropriation of Western cultural forms and the West’s construction of China’s belated mimicry, but it is in a deeper sense concerned with providing an analysis of copying in a global cultural condition where art reigns supreme. Copying and its corollary, creativity, are hence the figures of globalization that this study observes, and follows. Centered at a single site in southern and urban China, but following the intricate transnational connections that stem from its trade, this study utilizes Dafen village’s production and the reinvigoration of Eurocentric artistic discourses in its midst in order to prompt a reconsideration of aesthetic theories of imitation and appropriation. These theories are implicated in the narratives of historical progress through which China is imagined, but they are also embedded within the discourses and practices by which artists and painters make and work in contemporary China. As such, Dafen village presents, in this book, an opportunity to examine the uses of art in a historical moment in which the global stage has long been the presumed setting, and in which influence and mutual borrowing between China and the West are already in medias res.

.   .   .

A four hundred–square meter neighborhood located in the tatty but bustling edges of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, one hour’s drive north of the global financial capital of Hong Kong, and an hour south of the political capital and historic maritime port of Guangzhou (Canton), Dafen village is but an urban community of migrant workers, floating rural youths, small-time bosses, subdistrict-level officials, and passing foreign buyers, all engaged in the production and distribution of oil paintings for the world’s retail and wholesale consumer markets. While Dafen’s firms officially numbered above six hundred in 2004, they represent only a small proportion of the uncounted studios, galleries, and workshops within the district of Longgang in the city of Shenzhen. In turn, Shenzhen is but one node in a network of Chinese production centers that extends to the nearby cities of Dongguan, Guangzhou, and Zhuhai to Xiamen city in Fujian province, to Yiwu city in Zhejiang, to Beijing, Shanghai, and any Chinese city that holds a university art department or an art academy.

Dafen’s products are found in hotels, restaurants, homes, furniture shops, frame shops, souvenir shops, sidewalk stalls, and commercial art galleries anywhere in the world where oil painting signifies art. The trade has noted and well-established wholesale distribution points in Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Germany, France, Russia, Israel, Monaco, Morocco, Florida, Los Angeles, and New York.¹⁷ Dafen paintings are sold as works by named Italian artists in Hong Kong furniture shops, as works of struggling artists on the sidewalk of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Piazza Navona in Rome, as local landscape paintings by artists from Mont Blanc to Dubai, and from Piran, Slovenia, to Rockport, Massachusetts. Warehouses in Los Angeles and Miami offer paintings on eBay, and send out art students—encouraged to imply that the works are painted by themselves—to sell door-to-door in the suburbs. Dafen paintings have been spotted in a motel in the Crimea, Ukraine, and in the reconstructed motel room adjoining that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.¹⁸ Rumors abound that they may even have infiltrated art museums, art auctions, and the homes of wealthy collectors, and that the decades-old Starving Artist and weekend hotel art sales throughout suburban America in fact sell works painted in Chinese factories.¹⁹ Since these oil paintings do not in any way appear Chinese, the very fact that they are the work of Chinese painters would seem to capture the ironies of cultural globalization, infused to the very street level of an unremarkable slum and the manual labor of anonymous Chinese workers.

Yet the seemingly fantastic painting trade of Dafen village is neither new nor unique to this place and time. Oil painting workshops and studios have been operating in Dafen and Shenzhen since the early 1980s, and in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea since the 1960s. Neither is the practice unique to industrializing East Asia. Painters and wholesalers have reported working in similar painting studios and workshops in New York, New Jersey, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam. In 2007, for example, an aspiring New York contemporary artist confessed anonymously in Esopus magazine to a double life as a painter under a pseudonym, and recounted how she once worked in an American workshop with eight to ten other painters paid at six dollars an hour.²⁰ Or, as the Italian artist Gabriele Di Matteo has documented, in the town of Afragola outside of Naples, trade painters have been producing oil-on-canvas paintings since at least the 1970s, and like Dafen, the town also celebrates its trade with a jubilant annual painting contest.²¹ Though Di Matteo has reported that these Italian painters believe that their market was supplanted only in recent years by the Chinese, in fact, oil painting for export to Europe has been in demand in South China since the 1760s, and one of the earliest oil paintings by a Chinese artist—painted in 1610—sits today in the Il Gesù in Rome.²²

Indeed, if defined simply as the making of art for transnational consumption in intensive conditions of production, then the painting practices of the Chinese oil painting trade may well connect its roots to a host of art historical precedents, including the Dutch painting workshop, the souvenir painting production of Canaletto, the custom-service portrait studios of John Singer Sargent and Gilbert Stuart, the speculative series paintings of the Impressionists, the factories of Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, and the custom production studios of Zhang Huan and Takashi Murakami. Referring proudly to such legacies, a Dutch firm in Amsterdam, De Kunst-fabriek, borrows the rhetoric of Pop Art to explain its business strategy: selling contemporary paintings that are designed by the Dutch and painted by the Chinese.²³ Ultimately, if we were to define Dafen’s trade or export practice as simply art produced to the specifications of a client’s order or a patron’s commission, then there are certainly few historical art practices that are wholly unrelated to Dafen.

Neither would the claims and practices of Dafen painters preclude resemblance to those of the Chinese literati, an elite class of scholar-artists who have long claimed to hold the ideals of amateurism and art for art’s sake above all material concerns. Indeed, within Dafen itself, ink painters promote these very myths to claim that their works are more valuable or authentic than those of oil painters—even as they paint faster and more repetitively, and sell to more clients, than their oil counterparts.²⁴ The practices of both ink and oil painters in Dafen, as I detail in this book, will in fact closely echo those described in James Cahill’s groundbreaking study of the unspoken professional lives of Chinese literati painters from the Sung to the modern period.²⁵ The difference, we shall see, between Dafen village and these precedents is in the remarkable changes to the status of the artistic persona, that have taken place in the globalized contemporary culture of Post-Mao China.

Despite, therefore, the many historical precedents and contemporary parallels to which Dafen may be linked, it emerged as a totally new phenomenon in the popular and artistic imagination between 2004 and 2010, a moment of intense attention to the globalization of China. This was a period in which China’s ascendance in economic and political power called much attention to its cultural position on the world stage, as China held its first Olympics in 2008 and its first World Expo in 2010. Both were breathlessly bigger than all of their predecessors, and both were vexed by pronouncements of Chinese soft power and anxieties about Chinese cultural backwardness. Like the Dafen Copying Competition, they were events in which the Eurocentric expectations of modern development seemed to have been fully realized and showcased in impressive spectacles, though such grandiosity was greeted with profound skepticism because the political system that produced it was not supposed to be able to mount such progressive cultural displays.

In Shenzhen, China’s showcase frontier, officials vigorously pursued cultural policies intended to advance the city’s global competitiveness, celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the city’s founding, set in motion an urban vision to merge with Hong Kong to form an even greater global metropolis (Shen Kong), and finally cheered its own mini-Olympics for collegiate athletes in the 2011 Universiade. These undertakings consistently thrust Shenzhen into the world in the minds of its officials and its inhabitants, who welcomed to the city a renewed influx of foreign firms, projects, workers, tourists, and visitors. But this nascent cosmopolitanism looked merely provincial when compared with the far more impressive transformations of Beijing and Shanghai. Soon too, the southwestern megacity of Chongqing would boldly promote a countervision for China’s future, and Shenzhen’s migrant workers were simply returning home. So when Shenzhen’s officials mounted a pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo boldly named Shenzhen: Frontier for China Dreams, this ambitious title keenly reflected the city’s eagerness to renew its verve for urbanism, globalism, and progress.

It was during this period of jockeying for global relevance that Dafen village came to be the special focus of attention of Chinese and Western officials, journalists, designers, and artists, whose interventions in Dafen are the major object of study in this book. This attention to Dafen was initiated around 2004 by the subdistrict governments of the Buji Street Office and Longgang District, who promoted Dafen village as a model creative industry. Their efforts were first targeted at the Chinese news media, whose characteristic interest in labor politics and worker justice led it to tout Dafen as an immensely successful world art industry, one in which lowly Chinese peasants had mastered the mass production of original Western masterpieces. This view was then echoed by the news media in Europe and America, though not without a palpable irony.

The widespread interest generated by these journalistic narratives soon brought to Dafen Chinese and Western artists well known on the international contemporary art circuit. Working in video, performance, installation and other media, these artists visited Dafen and mounted projects in collaboration with local painters, projects that appropriated their paintings or represented them in the work. The completed works were exhibited in venues like Venice Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, Art Basel, and the Lisson Gallery, and a handful have since entered into prominent private collections. In addition, influential art world figures such as the Chinese painter Chen Danqing and the New York Asian contemporary art dealer Ethan Cohen have visited and lectured in Dafen, advising Dafen’s painters and officials on how to break into the real art world. Despite its apparent lowliness, Dafen village has thus nevertheless become visible in the contemporary art world, discussed on the cover of the New York Times and in the pages of Artforum. To my knowledge, at least three dozen such art projects about Dafen or the Chinese painting trade were produced from 2007 to 2011, and a number of them are examined in detail in this study.

Though the stated intentions of the contemporary artists who produced conceptual projects in Dafen were quite grand and benevolent—some even claimed to offer Dafen painters their first and only taste of creative work—their ambitions paled in scale and scope when compared to the projects that Chinese propaganda departments made and sponsored themselves. These took the form of fairs and festivals, with accompanying exhibitions and events such as the Dafen Copying Competition, but also included a steady stream of official commissions of paintings, photography, fiction, documentary, film, and television. Leaders at the highest level of the Chinese propaganda administration—including then de facto propaganda chief Li Changchun—paid official visits to Dafen, and Dafen was featured in prominent national Chinese television programs including Banbiantian (Half the Sky) and Duihua (Dialogue). Through such programs, propaganda producers represented Dafen village as a model bohemia, a successfully administered urbanized village where even the most marginalized Chinese citizen could become a creative artist.

Together, the art and propaganda surrounding Dafen culminated, as this study does, with Shenzhen’s pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, a project that was exclusively devoted to one celebratory theme—the dreams (mengxiang) of China’s world-famous copyists, the painters of Dafen village. In concluding with this event, which brought together both the work of the Chinese party-state and that of free contemporary artists, this study argues that there are surprisingly broad areas of ideological concert between Chinese propagandists and internationally practicing conceptual artists: an ideological congruency founded upon the universalist belief in the alienation of labor in copying, and the individualizing power of creativity.

In a history that is far from ironic, Dafen village thus emerged in the public sphere first as a dystopian object of the Chinese copy, and second, as a utopian subject of universal creativity. From the first Dafen Copying Competition discussed in this introduction to Dafen’s representation at the World Expo discussed in the final chapter, global contemporary artists and the Chinese party-state turned to Dafen’s anonymous painters as ciphers of China’s standing in world culture, and represented copying and creativity as geopolitical levers of cultural competence. Like the Cultural Industry Fair for which the Dafen Copying Competition was held, these representational engagements with Dafen village showcased the anonymous labor of reproduction while deploying a modernist discourse of originality to frame Dafen painters’ aspirations. In so doing, these two sets of privileged authors—contemporary artists and the Chinese party-state—put Dafen village into a global narrative of modernity and contemporaneity; in turn, anonymous Dafen painters and workers negotiated China’s globalization through intricate demands for artistic recognition and cultural citizenship. It is therefore towards an analysis of their condition (and that of their non-art) that this study also turns.

THE BESPOKE READYMADE

From 2007 to 2009, a Munich-based artist duo named Empfangshalle and a German video artist, Thomas Adebahr, hired painters in Dafen village to reproduce the complete German-language text of Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Entitled The Benjamin Project, the German artists’ Chinese painted text took up thirty-eight oil-on-canvas paintings, each made at the grandiose size of 187 x 137 centimeters (figure 0.3). Like nearly all the contemporary artists who will be discussed in the subsequent chapters, Empfangshalle and Adebahr conceived of Dafen painters as alienated Chinese copyists of original Western masterpieces, and sought to engage with Dafen painters in newly conceptual fashion. These German artists thus made a special effort to ask the painters to put their signatures on the back of each painting, insisting that these paintings were their own work.²⁶ They also invited the Dafen painters—as well as approximately twenty pairs of identical twins—to personally attend the exhibition opening when the paintings were exhibited at an art museum in Shenzhen in 2010.²⁷

In a project description written by the artists, Empfangshalle and Adebahr claimed that they had inverted Benjamin’s thesis, i.e., that the aura of the work of art withers in the age of mechanical reproduction. By their reasoning, since Benjamin’s text itself was printed (mechanically reproduced), by having each page painted in Dafen they had rendered the aura of the text visible, the result of which was a unique, non-reproducible presence.²⁸ In other words, the artists explicitly understood oil painting as an aura-making activity and specifically sought out Chinese painters’ labor as a means of reactivating that aura. Not only was the Dafen painters’ routine practice as nameless copyists inverted in their conception by the making of these originals, so, according to the conceptual artists, was Benjamin’s prescription for the age of the copy.

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Empfangshalle and Thomas Adebahr, The Benjamin Project, page #8 and page #9, from a series of 38, oil on canvas, 187 × 137 cm, 2007–9. Image courtesy of the artists.

It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Benjamin’s Work of Art essay in the contemporary valorization of the copy, and this representative reading of it lays out the critical grounds by which many contemporary artists engaged with Dafen village. While Benjamin does open his essay with an analysis of the power of print and photographic media to erode the cult value of traditional works of art (especially painting), in the essay, this critique is clearly developed in order to argue for the progressive potential of film to unleash an anti-Fascist mass subjectivity. For contemporary artists, however, Benjamin’s framing manifesto has largely been overshadowed by his critique of the traditional authority vested in aura, and his call for the kinds of artistic practices leading to its demise has become thoroughly depoliticized. Instead, Benjamin’s prediction for the disappearing authority of the work of fine art has proven profoundly wrong, for artists have largely failed to utilize the technologies of reproduction to sustainably challenge what Benjamin called the property system, or even what the art historian Caroline Jones has more closely defined as the regime of auratic authorship.²⁹ To wit, it is aura that artists like Empfangshalle and Adebahr seek to reproduce over and over.

In giving literal form to that pervasive desire to seek the aura in the copy, Empfangshalle and Adebahr’s Benjamin Project shares a great deal with other contemporary artists who have engaged with Dafen village. These projects are but a small sample of the powerful and continued legacy of Marcel Duchamp on contemporary art practices in general, and thus it is useful to note how Duchamp’s strategies were routinely emulated by European- and American-trained artists. Empfangshalle and Adebahr’s conceptual act—to reactivate the aura of the very text that announces its erosion—employs a self-reflexiveness that straightforwardly borrows from Duchamp’s expansive use of paradox, tautology, and other rhetorical games. Moreover, the artists specifically transform their arguments into an art object through the delegation of its production to skilled painters, an authorial strategy derived from Duchamp’s last painting, Tu m’... (figure 0.4), in which Duchamp was said to have delegated a portion of the painting to a professional sign painter. Around this apocryphal tale has formed a rich twentieth-century tradition, extending, for example, from Moholy-Nagy’s Telephone Paintings to Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings. Finally, the German artists’ appropriation of the otherwise manufactured products of Dafen village unambiguously draws its legitimacy from Duchamp’s nomination of the readymades as works of art (in a performative paradox that questioned the ontological status of the work of art)—which would provide the precedent by which a Dafen painting can appear as art, when it is so nominated by a conceptual artist. It was largely through these three recognizably Duchampian gestures—the paradox, the delegation of labor, and the readymade—that contemporary artists engaged with Dafen village, as it was under these very same rhetorics that projects such as The Benjamin Project were recognized, viewed, and bought as art by the international art audience.

Of course, as the world’s largest production center for hand-painted art products, Dafen village is emblematic of anything but the age of mechanical reproduction and it would be far more accurate to describe it as caught up in the age of manual reproduction.³⁰ As The Benjamin Project unwittingly lays bare, contemporary artists were able to construct a Duchampian paradox about Benjamin’s aura specifically because Dafen village is figured as China’s readymade manufacturer of hand-painted oil paintings. Underlying the German artists’ conception of the old medium of painting lies then, a deeply traditional value; one that—in the terms Walter Benjamin himself put it—relies on the persistent branding of manual reproduction as forgery, and the preservation of all the traditional authority of the original.³¹ In the chapters that follow, I will examine a host of other contemporary art projects made in Dafen to show how assumptions about painting as an aura-making and individually self-expressive activity are repeated, over and over, beneath such Duchampian moves. Though this traditional schema of art (i.e. the auratic values privileging painting and dependent upon originality, uniqueness, and authenticity) was directly and consistently challenged by Duchamp and many other twentieth-century artists, such works put it firmly back in place. Dafen village, in other words, has provided contemporary artists with the material and the venue for a postmodernist return to the modernist values of art.

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Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’…, oil on canvas, with bottle brush, three safety pins, and one bolt, with hand painted by A. Klang, 27 1/2 × 119 5/16 in., 1918. Coll. Yale University Gallery.

As Walter Benjamin observed, In principle, a work of art has always been reproducible.³² Indeed, it is difficult to imagine artistic production without the procedures of imitation, referentiality, multiplicity, or other related practices. The challenge, however, is to understand this reproducibility even when it is stretched to the far-flung peripheries of the art world. Thus, in this book I invite readers to consider the art products of Dafen (paintings and yet non-art) as objects produced under the reign of the global readymade, even without the privileged intervention of conceptual artists.

Just as Duchamp once suggested that oil paints are readymade (manufactured) and therefore all paintings merely assisted readymades, we can connect Dafen practices with those of conceptualism in order to highlight two equivalences that will be explored at length in subsequent chapters. First, that both conceptual and manual labor are inherently at work within all painterly practices—even if they are done repetitively, by non-Westerners, or for pay. Second, that the division of material and immaterial labor made by the legacy of conceptual art upholds a hierarchy among artists that contradicts conceptualism’s basic ideals of democratic and universal creativity.

Indeed, in these pages, I will show how Dafen painters and conceptual artists are alike in ways that trouble both art world assumptions and the public imagination: Just like contemporary artists, Dafen’s painters are independent and migratory contractors of their artistic labor to clients, patrons, bosses, and institutions, and their work is bought and sold in a market in which all sorts of seemingly false claims to true art must be made. Likewise, Dafen’s painters, artists, and bosses are acutely aware of the problems of artistic autonomy under market-oriented modes of production, and have developed incisive and canny strategies to negotiate, overcome, escape, criticize, and ironize it.³³ And like so many conceptual artists, Dafen’s painters are ready for hire and ready to appropriate the skilled labor of others—their orders (dingdan) are as likely to be done by the painter himself as they are painted by his wife, apprentice, friend, or outworker.

In other words, issues of critical concern in contemporary art practice—such as skilling and deskilling, the division of labor, and anticommodification—are as salient in Dafen production as they are in Conceptual Art.³⁴ Given these similarities, it would be self-deceiving to describe Dafen workers’ unveiled acknowledgment of the existence of the market as proof that they categorically produce fake art. To do so would be a deliberate failure to recognize one of the pillars of modern and contemporary aesthetic inquiry while further mystifying the market conditions under which

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Book 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.