Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade

by Winnie Wong

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.”

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction, China

302 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2013

Reviews

[Mary Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Western news outlets have been obsessed with Dafen painting village for years—the Chinese village (really an urban center) where tens of thousands of oil paintings (mostly copies of famous European artists like Vincent Van Gogh) are made and sold every year. Journalists and photographers alike aim to shock their readers with reports of the factory assembly-line production of painting, of copyright infringement, with the McDonaldification of “fine art.” But what is really going on in Dafen, and how can we reckon with its ramifications in the so-called “fine art” world?

Van Gogh on Demand is a fascinating combination of art history and ethnography.
The book explores the lives of people living and painting in the Dafen village—artists, bosses, gallerists, etc. who produce the thousand and thousands of oil paintings every year that are old both online and in retail markets largely outside of China. Through Wong’s interviews and observation we learn about their backgrounds, their processes, their industry, and their goals. We also examine the role that Dafen plays within the Chinese propaganda machine and how Dafen has changed with developments in Chinese cultural policy.

In addition to these perspectives, the book explores the thorny theoretical challenges that the Dafen village poses to the traditional narratives of “fine” and conceptual art. When Dafen village is talked about outside of China, the narrative is rife with anxiety about what it means that a village of people can churn out the “masterpieces” of European culture by the absolute dozen. Art, which has traditionally been held as the last bastion of handicraft and individual creativity or even genius in a world run by mechanization, seems to be under threat. If just anyone (who has been trained anyway) can make these, what is their aesthetic/historical/material/spiritual value?

But we now live in an art world where individual artistic genius is disconnected from manual labor and skill. Conceptual artists might well appropriate a work by another artist and re-Christen it their own work—in fact, conceptual artists, both Euro-American and Chinese, have used Dafen painter’s paintings in their conceptual art pieces. But Wong demonstrates that we can explore this connection even further by closely examining how Dafen painters relate to authorship, appropriation, and artistic identity in their lives and work.

This book is very theory-heavy (it draws from Wong’s PhD, and it shows.) Some will probably find it a slog, but it’s a thoroughly worthwhile slog in my opinion.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic journey that examines the meaning of art, artists, originality, skill and global inequality. A must read for artists and people who care about art.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very thorough and straightforward ethnography on painting and the meaning of art in Dafen, China. Very thoughtful, just not spectacular. In the epilogue, when we’re introduced to the possibility of someone else having written the dissertation, that was tantalizing—and I wish it had been a “fraud.”

[Fiona Sievert · Rating 3 out of 5]

real interesting and philosophical but did say essentially the same thing just a few too many times. read it for my anthropology of contemporary china class in two weeks though, so not the closest read ever

[Yisu Z. · Rating 3 out of 5]

对大芬村的研究，比较高概念一点，不能说展开地都挺充分，puzzle也不那么有意思，但是挺有启发的：reproduction, authenticity / copy (稿), authorship , appropriation, immitation, originality, readymade, value 足够再写本书。

[RYAN PHAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did not realize so much fake art was made in China

[Wsclai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really what I expected and it sounds too theoretical for me.