Art dealers in Dafen, a village near Shenzhen in which 2,000 artists churn out millions of reproductions of famous oil paintings, cut quickly to the chase when it comes to selling their canvases. 'We can give you Monet's View of Venice for 500 yuan,' says Zhang Xiaohua, who co-owns a gallery with her artist husband, Xu Yi, before whipping out a calculator. 'Or we can do you a deal on a Matisse, just 150 yuan. Or a van Gogh for 120 yuan. Sunflowers. You like Sunflowers? You can pay in Chinese money, euros, Hong Kong dollars. Renoir. Monet. No problem. What do you want?'
It's the kind of hustle familiar to anyone who does business in China. Forget the traditional image of the artist as a romantic, other-worldly aesthete, scratching out a living in a dingy garret as a slave to high ideals. This is art at its most commercial and industrial.
On the surface, Dafen is slick; the streets are nicely paved and the overall look is upmarket, just as one would expect the centre of southern China's burgeoning oil-painting copy industry to be. It's a long way from the grimy bazaars of yesteryear. Individual shoppers poke around the art village, but the big dollars come from corporate clients who swoop in and buy up big. It tends to be described as a village, but Dafen, in Buji town, on the outskirts of booming Shenzhen, is more of a giant oil-painting factory spread over a square kilometre than an artists' colony.
A 20-minute taxi ride from the Lowu checkpoint along the Shenhui highway, Dafen has been recently refurbished, with tidy rows of shops and murals hailing the late Deng Xiaoping and his achievements in opening up China. Everywhere you walk there are scores of open-fronted shops selling thousands of reproduced Matisses, van Goghs - practically any type of art work you desire. This is the oil-painting reproduction industry in action: bring a photo of your favourite work of art and they will have a freshly painted copy winging its way to you as soon as the paint dries.
Like so many other things in China, it's the scale of industry in Dafen that amazes; the artists working here supply at least 300 galleries in the village. Facing the street, you have the galleries. Out back, the painters knock out the knock-offs. Zhang's gallery is narrow and well-lit, and the walls are covered with paintings, ranging from carefully executed Gaugin rip-offs to startling 1970s prog-rock-style fantasy pieces depicting blonde maidens and winged nymphs. Fin-de-siecle Toulouse-Lautrec knock-offs rub shoulders with alarming photo-realist Pamela Andersons in oils, watched over by a stern-eyed portrait of an American bald-headed eagle. It's a giant celebration of kitsch.
Dafen was set up as an artists' colony 15 years ago by Hong Kong artist and dealer Huang Jiang, who was lured by low rents and the village's proximity to Hong Kong. The pioneering Huang arrived with more than 20 painters and apprentices in tow, and allowed the artists to live and work for nothing if they painted good quality fakes on the side. A few other art galleries opened in the 90s, but the real boom came in 2002, when the government decided to turn the village into a base of cultural industry. By April last year, Dafen had swelled enormously, boasting 145 oil-painting shops, 55 Chinese-painting shops, 20 arts supply shops and about 2,000 artists.