Jeroen de Kloet and Yiu Fai ChowThe trade volume of its oil painting industry is estimated to have reached 80 million yuan in
2003, skyrocketing to 430 million yuan towards the end of the decade to account for one-third
of the global commodity oil painting market (Art Radar 2012).
This “success story” was so extraordinary that it became exemplary. When Shenzhen’s
munici pal government drafted plans for its participation in the Shanghai World Expo, Dafen was
put forward to epitomize and valorize how creative industries and urban renewal practices col-
laborated to yield economic and cultural benefits. This was but one of the more recent examples
of official involvement in the construction and promotion of Dafen as an art production center.
As early as 2001, Buji’s administration perceived the potential of Dafen and redesignated it a
“‘cultural village’ performing the functions of oil painting trading, leisure and tourism, as well
as training” (Yang 2004, 67). In the midst of projects to ameliorate local housing and infrastruc-
ture challenges, Buji officials started organizing tours in 2002 to open up foreign markets. Since
2004, an annual International Cultural Industry Fair has been organized in Dafen, with one of
its aims being to foreground original works of the local artists. In 2007, an investment of one
hundred million yuan saw the realization of the 17,000-square-meter Dafen Art Museum in the
center of the village. Such attempts to shift from “copy to creative Shenzhen” (Art Radar 2012)
are in turn interwoven with the national longings to shift from “Made in China” to “Created in
China” (Keane 2013). If the celebrated catchphrase gaige kaifang (reform and opening up) and
its concomitant policy paradigm dictated the national economic trends in the 1980s and 1990s,
the new millennium saw an updated version of the motto: gaige chuangxin (reform and inno-
vation), which was put forward by former president Hu Jintao (Pang 2012, 8). While the new
policies, whether in Shenzhen or in Beijing, are scripted in the form of promises offered by the
so-called “creative economy,” fundamentally, they testify to the discursive power of authenticity
and originality, as well as the legal authority and economic realities of intellectual ownership.
As far as Dafen is concerned, every attempt to demonstrate that it is more than a base of fake
painting production, in fact, reiterates the dominant perception that it is nothing more than that.
aesthetics, circulation and aspirations
In debates about shanzhai products, as we observed earlier, much attention is given to their sta-
tus as “copies.” With the exception of Wong’s study (2014), close readings of the aesthetics and
craftsmanship of these artworks are rare. More common are readings of artworks as they relate
to Dafen itself (Pang 2012). Wong (2014) intertwines her ethnography of Dafen with analyses
of artworks that engage with Dafen. Wong shows how the painter–workers are being asked not
to remain too close to the original on which they draw, but instead to develop their own style.
This attests to the creativity involved in the making of shanzhai art.
In the following, we would first like to make a plea for taking this creativity and the aesthetics
of the works themselves more seriously. In our conversations with the Dafen painters for exam-
ple, they described several approaches they employed to create their works: using images from
the Internet, reworking existing masterpieces, or playing with homophonic puns of Chinese
words for “auspicious” effects. Second, the distribution of these artworks warrants further study:
who buys them, for what price, who are the intermediaries, and how do they end up in a hotel
room in Detroit or in the shop of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam? Whereas a study of the
aesthetics of an artwork recuperates the creativity of the makers, the study of its circulation, and
thus its underlying political economy, helps steer the analysis away from generalizing rubrics like
“global capitalism,” which continue to frame the painter–workers as migrant workers and vic-
tims. Third, we turn our attention to the people creating the paintings. What became clear to us
after just a few days of exploring Dafen, was the sheer diversity of stories there. Not only do the