Shanzhai culture, Dafen art, and copyrights8,000 artists responsible for creating 60 percent of the world’s oil paintings” is generally accred-
ited to a person by the name of Huang Jiang (Al Jazeera 2010). Trained as a painter in Guangzhou,
Huang immigrated to Hong Kong in 1970, where he worked and continued his art education
at the same time. After an initial career as a solo artist, Huang became involved in the business
of trade paintings. Finding it difficult to expand his business because of the high rents in Hong
Kong, in the summer of 1989 he decided to set up a new workplace on a piece of farmland just
outside the city proper of Shenzhen.
When Huang first moved to Dafen, he took some thirty apprentices with him. Responding
to large orders and the demand for efficiency as well as standardization, Huang favored using
a strict division of labor, assigning apprentices to handle specific parts of a painting. This
“production-line model” (Art Radar 2012) proved to be a huge success and its associated, and
often highly mediatized, images of mass production, anonymous workers, and uniform copies
became the dominant representation of how Dafen works. Subsequently, Huang’s apprentices
set up their own businesses while others were lured to Dafen by Huang’s commercial success
and helped give shape to Dafen Village, as we know it (Yang 2004; Wong 2014; Harney 2005;
see Figure 15.2).
According to a Shenzhen Academy of Social Sciences report published in 2004, more than
700 individual artist studios and 280 galleries were operating in Dafen, with more than 2,000
people working in the area and more than 6 million paintings sold per year (Yang 2004). Of all
the trade paintings circulated in the United States, 70 percent came from China, among which
80 percent originated from Shenzhen (Yang 2004). Between 2004 and 2010, the number of
Dafen painters officially counted and registered ranged from 5,000 to 8,000, and they pro-
duced 3–5 million paintings per year in hundreds of small studios and workshops (Wong 2014).
Figure 15.2 Transporting Van Gogh in Dafen (photo by Jeroen de Kloet)