New Left Review 91, January-February 2015

Barry Schwabsky

GOETHE’S NIGHTMARE

In the early years of the twenty-first century, reports began to emerge in the Western press of a ‘painting village’ in China filled with workers, rather than artists, assiduously painting copies of the masterpieces of Western art as if on an assembly line. In her recent book, Winnie Won Ying Wong recalls some of the headlines: ‘Van Gogh from the Sweatshop’, ‘Chinese Village Paints by Incredible Numbers’, ‘Van Gogh, Gauguin: Cheaper by the Dozen’. [1] Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2014, $35 320 pp, 978 0226 02489 9 The ‘urban village’ of Dafen—in reality, a high-rise suburb—lies on the outskirts of Shenzhen, the booming Special Economic Zone across the straits from Hong Kong. Here, in 1989, Huang Jiang, a painter and businessman, set up a workshop employing twenty-six apprentices, mainly teenagers recruited from Fujian or Guangdong. The enterprise was successful and expanded fast, selling its products to American retailers like K-Mart and publishing, as Wong explains, annual catalogues containing over two hundred works: ‘French beaux-arts genre scenes, American minimalism, Bouguereau, Thomas Kinkade, and more.’ Huang’s workshop attracted others, and was soon staffed by thousands of painters. As Wong notes, the annual entrance examination for the Guangdong Academy of Fine Arts attracts 120,000 applicants, of whom only 1,225 are accepted; Dafen offered an alternative for those who had already undergone the rigorous preparation for the Academy’s exam as well as artistically inclined young people who never had access to such training. By the time Western visitors began to arrive, Dafen had become to commercial art what Helmand is to heroin, reportedly cranking out more than half the world’s supply. By 2007, as Philip Tinari put it in Artforum, the ‘village’ was ‘a dense warren of alleyways and six- and seven-storey concrete buildings, containing nothing but apartments and workshops dedicated to oil painting’.

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