Winnie Won Yin Wong

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.… (plus d'informations)