Jeroen de Kloet and Yiu Fai ChowIn our conversations with Dafen painter–workers, Beijing’s 798 Art District often surfaced as
an impossible ideal. In Wang Xingping’s words, “I have never thought of going to 798. I heard
that only top talents go there ... However hard we try here, I don’t think we can ever get our-
selves to Beijing.” But many did have the ideal of at least having their own gallery where they
could sell their own work. Zhou Guohua explained how his plan was “to make better paintings,
save a little money and then do what I like to do. For instance open a gallery and sell the paint-
ings I like.” Wang Li, a twenty-three-year-old fashion design graduate from Chengdu, claimed
no plans: “I guess I just keep on working, as I’m doing now, take some orders, and then draw a
plan later. My dream is just to paint” (see Figure 15.4).
Conclusion
In this chapter we have argued for the use of the notion of shanzhai to avoid getting trapped
in an original–fake binary, which, as it is deeply entrenched in the global IPR regime, requires
rethinking. We have proposed to further research shanzhai along three different dimensions:
aesthetics, circulation, and aspirations. Our Dafen experience confronts us with the empirical
limits of our conceptual move towards shanzhai. It is a term the painter–workers do not really
use. We think it is important to emphasize this, and read it as a reminder for academic modesty
(Kuipers 2013) and the value of empirical research. How useful is shanzhai as a concept to ana-
lyze paintings and painter–workers in Dafen when—despite its particular popularity in online
vernacular discourse—the painter–workers do not employ the term themselves? Furthermore,
our interviews reveal the resilience and hegemony of a globalized artistic discourse that thrives
on individuality, talent, and originality; and to which reproduction, faking, and commercialism
function as its constitutive outsides. Again, this runs counter to our wish to debunk these moral
justifications of an IPR regime, unless we ascribe the articulations of these painter–workers to
“false consciousness,” which we do not want to do.
We see this disjuncture between theory, academic debates, and the actual practices we wit-
nessed in Dafen as an important reminder for those conducting empirical research. While the
notion of shanzhai may be of help to conceptually rethink the IPR regime, much more needs to
be done to truly unsettle this discourse. On the other hand, we believe the empirical routes pro-
posed here—aesthetics, circulation, and aspirations—problematize the easy generalizations that
continue to be made about China as a copying and counterfeiting nation. As our brief study has
shown, these routes may not lead to an outright alternative to the global IPR regime, but they
help undermine persisting stereotypes, especially regarding the life and fate of migrant work and
the assumed evils of global capitalism—thereby providing a more complex representation of
those living and working in Dafen Village.
Finally, we posit that an approach through the prisms of aesthetics, circulation, and aspira-
tions may be mobilized to study other forms of copying. Conceptually, the terminology used—
“faking” or “shanzhai”—is less of a concern; what matters is that the sheer diversity we witnessed
in Dafen is likely to multiply when we move the analysis to different objects—a shanzhai iPhone
will involve different aesthetics, modes of circulation, and aspirations when compared to the
work of a shanzhai star on the Internet. We believe it is important to commit ourselves to such
diversity and complexity. This, we are aware, may well be an expected outcome of academic
work: things are more complicated than they seem. Nevertheless, when it comes to the global
circulation of pervasive ideas about China as a global factory with hordes of anonymous migrant
workers or the perception of China as a copying nation devoid of “true” creativity, such a com-
mitment remains urgent.