In China, Art to Gogh

How migrant workers produce replications of Western masterpieces.

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The southern Chinese city of Shenzhen is well known for the easy availability of cheap electronics and its bustling export-oriented economy. But when the city's authorities mounted a pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, they wanted to show a more cultured face. That's when they turned to the painters of Dafen, the subject of art historian Winnie Wong's recently published book " Van Gogh on Demand."

An urban village located within Shenzhen, Dafen has become known in recent years for a community of several thousand rural migrant workers who produce more than 100,000 paintings a year, many of which are now found in Chinese hotel rooms or in the homes of Western tourists returned from a trip. For the Shanghai fair, hundreds of these artists each produced a panel of art that when compiled formed a giant reproduction of the Mona Lisa. It fronted the pavilion's facade.

"There's a current vibe in China about the 'Chinese dream,'" Ms. Wong said in an interview, referencing a slogan popularized by Chinese President Xi Jinping last year. "The Dafen story kind of anticipated this because it's a story about migrant workers that have reached their dream and are simultaneously artists. That's what's so tantalizing."

Ms. Wong, a Canadian-Chinese assistant professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, started working on the book six years ago when she was writing her dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She subsequently immersed herself in the village, working variously as an apprentice painter and a dealer who helped her acquaintances procure paintings. "Everybody said they could paint anything in two weeks, and I realized that the only way I could test them was if I placed orders," she said.

Her curiosity was initially piqued by what she saw on a visit to Dafen in 2006: Workers from the Chinese countryside learning how to paint by copying the masterpieces of Western greats such as Van Gogh. (The book's title was inspired by how many apprentice artists in Dafen begin by imitating Van Gogh works such as "Starry Night" and "Sunflowers," in part because his pieces are relatively easy to copy, but also because of a jump in the auction prices of his work in the 1980s, when painters began congregating in Dafen.)

"This kind of [replication] is part of a long history of art that goes back to the Renaissance," Ms. Wong said. "Most of the workers don't have a formal arts education, but my book argues that we should understand them pretty much as we understand all artists, no matter where they're based, or what context or market they're working for."

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