Book review: Van Gogh on Demand, by Winnie Wong

by Winnie Won Yin Wong
University of Chicago Press
4 stars
David Bartram

Dafen, a small village in the suburbs of Shenzhen, is an unlikely centre of the international art world. Yet over the past two decades it has developed a multimillion-dollar art industry, defined not by unbridled creativity but instead by its uncanny ability to mimic.

Thousands of artists produce more than 100,000 copycat oil paintings a year, including the old masters and 20th-century greats such as Dali and Warhol, alongside some lesser-known names and even the odd original. These are then hawked everywhere from the streets of New York, where they are often presented as the work of struggling artists, to fine boutiques in Hong Kong, where they are sold as works by "named" Italian artists.

In a climate of growing fear over China's brazen intellectual property infringements, such a set-up might be cause for concern, or even, in the case of artists still protected by copyright, a visit from the lawyers.

But, as Winnie Wong argues, rather than write off Dafen as a cynical money-grab, it should be celebrated as a triumph of artistic endeavour which has turned thousands of rural workers into proficient artists through a wide-ranging apprenticeship scheme.

Most start out learning to copy Van Gogh's The Starry Night and Sunflowers, because of their relative ease and popularity. Paintings are almost exclusively made to order; when Wong first visits and talks with painters who claim they can replicate just about anything, she has to put in some orders to prove the point.

Wong, an art historian from the University of California, Berkeley, takes a multi-faceted approach to her investigation of Dafen. She visits first as a casual onlooker, talks with art traders around the world who buy from the village, and even receives a basic apprenticeship, sharing with the reader a step-by-step guide to painting a perfect replica of Sunflowers.