Shenzhen's Dafen Oil Painting Village has transformed into the world's largest producer of knock-off paintings - and then some

----By Brandon Zatt

Standing on a pair of battered old paint cans under an icy fluorescent light, Li Weiqiu reaches for the peak of a snow-capped mountain. High up on the canvas, where waning sunlight, he flecks the clouds gold. Li keeps one eye on the canvas and one on a postcard of Thomas Kinkade's "The Warmth of Home", never lifting his brush.

"Kinkade's my favourite painter," says Li, a lanky, 28-year-old art school grad from Jiangxi province, "but if he came here, it'd probably only be to sue me."

Welcome to Dafen Oil Painting Village, the world's new centre for oil painting imitations. The once obscure village, located on the outskirts of southern Chinese boomtown Shenzhen, now produces an estimated 60 to 70 percent of the world's oil copies and reproductions, mostly for export to Western Europe and the United States. And, like so many other industries in China's Pearl River Delta, they beat the competition by being cheap and fast.

Li and his wife Xu arrived in Dafen five years ago, when life was cheap and business was just starting to take off. Now, they must compete with some 700 galleries and 5,000 painters offering increasingly sophisticated work. As rent skyrockets, Dafen's cottage industry is expanding past the village limits. For individual painters like Li, every brushstroke is a battle to keep from getting pushed out.

"Of course I prefer painting my own stuff," he says, "but that's not what people come here to buy."

At least not yet. "It used to only be copies," says dealer Winnie Huang. "But now we're seeing lots of new product design. Most companies are branching out in their own directions." With government investment, revenue and experience coalescing, Dafen's cottage industry may be bursting into a whole new commercial art force.

A village blooms The road to Dafen looks like it is about to fall apart. From Shenzhen's burgeoning, planned Luohu district, the road reaches a checkpoint at the old dividing wall. Crossing over, the area erupts in a clutter of ramshackle homes and clogged streets.

Approaching Dafen, however, the row houses pull back, opening on to a large square. Buildings sport colourful new coats of paint, floor-to-ceiling windows and a mural depicting village life. Guarding the entrance, shiny red and navy blue oil-painted arches champion the "perfect integration of industry and art". A massive sculpted hand holds a brush aloft like a flag. Inside, lychee and palm tree-shaded lanes, lined with hundreds of brightly coloured canvases, lead to plazas where children play.

The wall played a significant role in Dafen's genesis. Shenzhen was a restricted border area before Deng Xiaoping declared it a special economic zone in 1979. Its proximity to British Hong Kong was seen as so threatening that the Chinese government built a wall through the city. Mainland Chinese were required permits to pass. Companies established offices "within the wall", bordering Hong Kong, while factories chose cheaper areas outside where workers could come and go as they pleased.

In the mid-1980s, Hong Kong painter and art dealer Huang Jiang set up a workshop inside Shenzhen's wall, adjacent to Hong Kong. "It was such a hassle," says Huang. "My painters needed permits to enter. I was always being called to the police station to fetch them." In the summer of 1989, with a stack of orders in hand, Huang and 26 other painters crossed the wall to Dafen and rented a house. "There were green hills and a small stream, chickens and pigs and geese. It was beautiful," he recalls.

It was a transitional time. As Shenzhen urbanised, it swept across the countryside, subsuming farming and fishing villages like Dafen. With neither fields nor ponds, villagers paved over their gardens and built bigger homes with rooms to let. With cheap rent and narrow streets often closed to cars, many of these "urban villages" became red-light districts.

Huang may have saved Dafen from a similar fate. As business grew, he converted homes into workshops and dorms, piping copies directly to Hong Kong. "Rent was really cheap and we had big orders," he says. "We were doing 200,000-500,000 pieces for Wal-Mart and K-Mart. More painters started coming." Jason Cai, a 33-year-old painter from Shantou, was one of them. Graduating from high school in 1992 with no real prospects except a love for painting, he left home and threw in his lot with Huang. "It was a good life," he says. "We made RMB3,000-4,000 (US$400-530, €280-370) a month, which was really good money in '92! I met painters from all over China. We'd paint for a few months, blow all our money, and then paint some more."

Gaining notoriety For years, Dafen's painters, mostly single young men, worked anonymously for Huang and a few other reproduction houses. "There were no galleries, no dealers here," says Cai. "It was all workshops. Nobody was going direct. Nobody knew."

Hong Kong buyers eventually came looking for painters rather than just paintings. "I decided to start my own business on the side," says artist Zhou Xinxiong. "Then, in 1996, with a few friends, we opened the first gallery in Dafen."

They were soon shut down for operating without a licence. "We lobbied the local government," Zhou recalls. "We had nothing, so we asked them to give us a break. The Ministry of Commerce sent inspection teams and they saw it was true. Then they sent some people to give us free licences. Galleries started opening up after that."

By 1999, 10 years after Huang Jiang first moved in, the Shenzhen government began to recognise Dafen's commercial potential. As officials visited and money started pouring in, Huang's painter's sensed their time had come. They broke ranks and struck out on their own.

"We grew up," says Cai, who left Huang to found Huidan Arts and Crafts. "We got married and started families. It became too expensive for Huang to maintain assembly lines. Besides, who wants to paint on a line? Now, painters are specialising and working from home. Larger companies outsource from them and quality has improved all the way around."

The real masterpiece may be Dafen itself. With the new millennium, demand abroad for Chinese cultural products, including oils, soared while Shenzhen found its industrial manufacturing capacity stretched. Changing tack, the young metropolis began promoting cultural industry. The coup came in 2004, when the gears of private enterprise and government support meshed at Shenzhen's First International Cultural Industry Fair. Dafen stole the show - and orders from around the world.

Beyond imitation What is most striking about Dafen is not the volume of paintings, but the sheer variety of them. While Cai's gallery focuses on the works of famous contemporary Chinese painters, when asked to push produce a series of Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" in different color schemes, it was ready in days. And while a reproduction of Andy Warhol's "Marilyn Monroe" hangs on his wall, anyone with a headshot and some cash can have his own pop-art portrait in the style of Monroe or Mao Zedong.

Dafen painters are beginning to move away from straight copying. Inspired by the stylised landscapes of traditional Chinese ink, many of Dafen's Chinese oil painters are recreating these same scenes with bright, vivid oils.

"Dafen is creating a bridge between Eastern and Western culture," says Huang Jiang's partner, Huang Tong. "Because of Dafen, more Chinese are becoming interested in Western painting and more foreigners are getting to know China."

This has certainly been the case for dealer Winnie Huang, whose forays into framing and design have opened up more then just channels of international trade. "My biggest benefit," she says, "has been making friends from all over the world. I've gotten to learn about other cultures and religions and to visit other countries. It's totally opened up my mind."

Copyright is a flashpoint, and parties on both sides have reported increased pressure, especially over works of painters still living or recently deceased. But this pressure may be just what Dafen needs. "Copyright issues are encouraging more new creations and original products," says Huang. "Our painters are now taking themes from famous works and giving it their own flare."

At this year's cultural industry fair, Dafen unveiled a sleek new museum showcasing their original paintings and offerings from the nation's top art school grads. The art wasn't all original, though; over 200 painters competed in front of a crowd to see who could copied a single portrait the fastest, and shoppers strolled with half-guilty smiles along Dafen's shaded lanes, carrying paintings they might otherwise see in museums.