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Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade: Book about the painters of Dafen, who paint hundreds of thousands of canvases by hand. This is often reported as an “assembly line,” but as Wong documents there are really lots of small firms and the production is more craftlike, at least compared to real machine production. But Dafen has other meanings and is deeply embedded in both capitalist narratives and narratives about art and postmodernism. For example, one blogger described these paintings as “hand painted” “only in the sense that human beings actually handled them,” because the blogger didn’t consider the painters appropriately skilled. At the same time, Western high art has conferred authorial status on the “boss” who causes art to come into being (like Warhol) while denigrating the hands that actually did the physical work. Individuality is moved elsewhere, up the production chain; physical work becomes craft (or kitsch), a process enhanced and complicated by the relationship between art and the market.
The relations between bosses and artisans in Dafen are constantly being negotiated, in at least partial defiance of the ideology of authenticity/creativity. Instead of being deskilled through division of labor, Dafen painters actually learn transferrable skills and work independently whenever possible. Though many outsiders, including Chinese outsiders, see Dafen as anti-true art, potential painters often come to Dafen because they believe in self-actualization through creative labor.
Even painting for the trade isn’t necessarily copying inasmuch as the painters don’t feel tied to making exact copies of a specific original, but rather to the demands of the market; thus transformation, innovation, appropriation, and delegation are part of their practices as much as they’re part of the practices of Western “high” artists. Fidelity and copying are rarely terms on which their works are judged. Still, China’s government wants Dafen to be an example of emerging Chinese “creativity,” opposed to the presumed “copying” of current production practices. Wong makes the Foucauldian argument that these concepts actually produce each other, given the way in which they are related by officials and artists. (For example, the apotheosis of Chinese art is landscape painting—so the most artistic, deemed-creative artists get grants to go paint landscapes that have been painted hundreds of times before.) Wong also sets forth multiple overlapping divisions in Dafen’s own painters, who often define themselves as true artists versus some other group of Dafen painters. (I wish she’d talked more about gender; she often speaks of painters and their wives, but women are clearly doing a lot of the painting—part of the practice is that painters regularly get other people to do “their” work, and the commissioner doesn’t care as long as the timing and quality are right.)
Dafen is profoundly unsettling, Wong suggests, because its existence indicates that there’s nothing van Gogh did that a farmer couldn’t also do, no true individuality as expressed in labor. At the same time, the social position of Dafen painters makes it difficult if not impossible for most of them to be recognized as “true” artists, because it’s individuality itself in the form of an authorial persona that must be produced with the consent of the art world.
The relations between bosses and artisans in Dafen are constantly being negotiated, in at least partial defiance of the ideology of authenticity/creativity. Instead of being deskilled through division of labor, Dafen painters actually learn transferrable skills and work independently whenever possible. Though many outsiders, including Chinese outsiders, see Dafen as anti-true art, potential painters often come to Dafen because they believe in self-actualization through creative labor.
Even painting for the trade isn’t necessarily copying inasmuch as the painters don’t feel tied to making exact copies of a specific original, but rather to the demands of the market; thus transformation, innovation, appropriation, and delegation are part of their practices as much as they’re part of the practices of Western “high” artists. Fidelity and copying are rarely terms on which their works are judged. Still, China’s government wants Dafen to be an example of emerging Chinese “creativity,” opposed to the presumed “copying” of current production practices. Wong makes the Foucauldian argument that these concepts actually produce each other, given the way in which they are related by officials and artists. (For example, the apotheosis of Chinese art is landscape painting—so the most artistic, deemed-creative artists get grants to go paint landscapes that have been painted hundreds of times before.) Wong also sets forth multiple overlapping divisions in Dafen’s own painters, who often define themselves as true artists versus some other group of Dafen painters. (I wish she’d talked more about gender; she often speaks of painters and their wives, but women are clearly doing a lot of the painting—part of the practice is that painters regularly get other people to do “their” work, and the commissioner doesn’t care as long as the timing and quality are right.)
Dafen is profoundly unsettling, Wong suggests, because its existence indicates that there’s nothing van Gogh did that a farmer couldn’t also do, no true individuality as expressed in labor. At the same time, the social position of Dafen painters makes it difficult if not impossible for most of them to be recognized as “true” artists, because it’s individuality itself in the form of an authorial persona that must be produced with the consent of the art world.
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"On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carre, in the Museum of the Louvre. This commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts, but the gentleman in question had taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo's beautiful moon-borne Madonna in profound enjoyment of his posture. He had removed his hat, and flung down beside him a little red guide-book and an opera-glass. [...] He had looked out all the pictures to which an asterisk was affixed in those formidable pages of fine print in his Badeker; his attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down with an aesthetic headache. He had looked, moreover, not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces, and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy much more than the original.
[...]
But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the aesthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently promising acquaintance. Decision, salubrity, jocosity, prosperity, seem to hover within his call; he is evidently a practical man, but the idea in his case, has undefined and mysterious boundaries, which invite the imagination to bestir itself on his behalf.
As the little copyist proceeded with her work, she sent every now and then a responsive glance toward her admirer. The cultivation of the fine arts appeared to necessitate, to her mind, a great deal of byplay, a great standing off with folded arms and head drooping from side to side, stroking of a dimpled chin with a dimpled hand, sighing and frowning and patting of the foot, fumbling in disordered tresses for wandering hair-pins. These performances were accompanied by a restless glance, which lingered longer than elsewhere upon the gentleman we have described. At last he rose abruptly, put on his hat, and approached the young lady. He placed himself before her picture and looked at it for some moments, during which she pretended to be quite unconscious of his inspection. Then, addressing her with the single word which constituted the strength of his French vocabulary, and holding up one finger in a manner which appeared to him to illuminate his meaning, "Combien?" he abruptly demanded."
(Henry James, The American, 1877)
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