Dafen
Dafen ( Chinese 大芬社区 , Pinyin Dafen Shequ ) is a population Community of the road district Buji in District Longgang the prefecture-level city Shenzhen in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong . Within a few years it developed into the world's largest workshop for copied oil paintings.
The artist village of Dafen
Since the Dafen community emerged from the former "Dafen village" (大 芬 村) of the former large community of Buji, it is still often referred to as a village (Chinese cun ). Buji is only seven kilometers from Hong Kong. It has an area of 30.89 km², of which the “artist village” Dafen takes up about four.
history
A poor village 20 years ago, Dafen has now developed into a modern community of residents in Shenzhen. Dafen is also known as the “artist village” because more than 10,000 junior painters and 2,000 talented artists in over 300 workshops export around five million paintings to all over the world every year. This probably corresponds to over 50 percent of global production with a value of around 30 million euros. The majority consists of mass production of well-known masterpieces, mostly the same motif in large numbers.
Huang Jiang
The cornerstone of this success was laid by Huang Jiang , who is now over 60 years old and founded the first workshop for copying well-known works of art in Dafen in 1989. Low rental and wage costs enabled his workshop to grow by leaps and bounds.
However, it only took a few years before some of his employees copied his model and opened their own workshops. Today only about 40 painters work for him and earn tens of thousands of euros a year.
Painting in chord
In order to be able to produce large numbers in a short time, these are produced like on an assembly line. Every painter has a color and goes from one painting to the next once he's done his part. These copies are produced by painters without any academic training. The main buyers are product and furniture chains from America and Europe.
Meanwhile, many graduates from the best art school in China come to Dafen. These creative artists create only a few pictures and still get a monthly wage of a maximum of one thousand euros. This is between three and ten times more than what an assembly line copier can get. There are no fixed wages here; payment is based on the number of copies made. By Chinese standards, the money earned is enough to be able to live well and even save a little. A special incentive for many artists is the free division of working hours. A chord painter creates between 20 and 30 pictures per day.
Legal gray area
Although it is officially forbidden in China to copy artists who have not been dead for at least 50 years, hardly anyone cares. For the copier, only the fulfillment of an order and the satisfaction of the customer usually count.
The most copied painters
The most frequently copied "Old Masters" are William Adolphe Bouguereau , Mary Cassatt , Paul Cézanne , Marc Chagall , John Constable , Salvador Dalí , Edgar Degas , Paul Gauguin , Vincent van Gogh , Gustav Klimt , Édouard Manet , Franz Marc , Henri Matisse , Claude Monet , Thomas Moran , Pablo Picasso , Camille Pissarro , Auguste Renoir , Alfred Sisley and John William Waterhouse .
Web links
- Chinese art work: Van Gogh's off the assembly line , Spiegel Online, August 21, 2006
Coordinates: 22 ° 36 ′ 34.3 " N , 114 ° 8 ′ 13.5" E
Individual evidence
- ↑ Martin Paetsch: Chinese art work: Van Goghs from the assembly line . In: Spiegel Online . August 21, 2006 ( spiegel.de [accessed February 18, 2018]).