Updated January 16, 2025 at 11:40 p.m.*
DAFEN — In a small damp studio in the southern Chinese village of Dafen seven young, exhausted craftsmen are applying brushstrokes to a series of canvases hung side by side on the walls. Nearby, a shirtless colleague is fast asleep. The bowls of rice and bottles of beer on the table will have to wait. The small team is hurrying to complete an order. At the end of their brushes? Sunflowers, irises and a starry night. All famous paintings by Vincent Van Gogh that they are copying in an assembly line.
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“In the early 2000s, I had eight apprentices on my team, and our job was to fill orders from customers in Europe and North America. Once the batches of paintings were completed, we would have a rest period while waiting for the next order,” recalls Zhao Xiaoyong, looking at a painting, recalling his past life.
Some 27 years after settling in Dafen, Zhao Xiaoyong, 52, is still here, but everything around him has changed. The small, isolated village has now been swallowed up by Shenzhen, an ultramodern megalopolis of 14 million inhabitants facing Hong Kong.
And today, Zhao is trying to make a living from his own creations, which he exhibits in his small studio — part gallery, part workshop — tucked away at the end of an alley. It’s a difficult transition for this self-taught artist, as it is for the 8,000 or so artists working in the surrounding studios.
Never heard of Van Gogh before
Originally from a village in central China, Zhao was just 19 when he arrived in Shenzhen, like thousands of rural workers migrating to the cities to take on a succession of odd jobs in the factories of a country undergoing rapid industrialization. “I started painting and coloring when I was working in a handicraft factory,” he explains. Once his long days of hard labor were over, the young man began sketching, a passion he’d had since childhood.
A few years later, he heard about Dafen’s replica industry and decided to give it a try. “I’d never seen such beautiful oil paintings. The brother of one of my factory mates who worked there took me under his wing and I learned the profession with him.”
In the early 2000s, three out of every five oil paintings sold worldwide came from Dafen.
Zhao had never heard of Van Gogh when it was suggested that he try his hand at copying “Café Terrace at Night” from a postcard. The first attempts were unsellable, but the business took off. “I sold my first copy for 100 yuan (13 euros). That was a lot of money for me at the time! I was very happy,” he remembers.
The village was in full swing at the time. Orders poured in by the thousands for reproductions of Van Gogh, Monet or the Mona Lisa. In the early 2000s, three out of every five oil paintings sold worldwide came from Dafen. They can be found hanging on the walls of hotels, restaurants and homes across Europe and the U.S.
From cottage industry to mass production
It was to meet this growing demand that Hong Kong-based painter Huang Jiang decided to cross the Pearl River Delta some 10 years earlier. A businessman specializing in the reproduction of paintings, Huang had just been chosen by the U.S. retail giant Walmart as its global supplier of oil paintings.
In search of a cheap army of painters, he spotted the peaceful hamlet of Dafen and transformed three peasants’ houses into a 1,000-square-meter painting studio.
“I received a large number of foreign commissions every month. The biggest order was from a French client for 360,000 paintings, to be completed within two months,” Huang Jiang later explained in a book, “At first, I didn’t want to accept the commission, but the 12 painters on my team all told me in unison to accept it.”
“There were painters who only did the sky, others only the mountains, water, trees and so on.”
Everyone started calling friends and family, and making the rounds of the surrounding factories to recruit young men ready to pick up a paintbrush. All 360,000 paintings were completed in just a month and a half. To keep up the pace, Dafen’s self-taught painters applied assembly-line production methods. The painting is not done by one person, but by a team of apprentices supervised by a master who adds the finishing touch.
“There were those who only did the sky, others only the mountains, and then again for water, trees and so on,” recalls Huang Tong, who took part in the adventure alongside his uncle, Huang Jiang. “We trained them in two days and divided the work like on an assembly line.”
The Chinese Van Gogh
Zhao was one of those migrant workers who reproducing the masterpieces of the Musée d’Orsay and elsewhere, for a handful of yuan. After several years as an apprentice, he opened his own workshop and multiplied his copies of the Dutch painter to the point where his friends nicknamed him the “Chinese Van Gogh.”
It’s impossible for him to estimate how many Van Goghs have come out of his studio. “‘I must have produced several tens of thousands of ‘Sunflowers,'” he says today. And all without ever having seen an original painting. Until one day in 2014, when Zhao left China to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where the artist painted “The Starry Night.”
“I was deeply moved by these paintings, which I had reproduced countless times before.”
“I was deeply moved by these paintings, which I had reproduced countless times before. In Arles, I felt Van Gogh’s artistic quest, and I imagined that he had passed through the same alleys as I had,” Zhao says.
The trip was like an electroshock for Zhao. On his return from Europe, he painted a series of personal paintings called “Dialogue with Van Gogh”, in which he portrayed himself in the presence of the Dutch artist. While he continued to use the style of the famous master, he began to move toward original creations.
This change of direction is even more necessary now that Dafen’s golden age is over. With the 2008 financial crisis, orders from abroad collapsed, leaving the 20,000 painters crammed into a territory of less than half a square kilometer.
“Before 2008, more than 90% of Dafen’s paintings were sold abroad. By 2015, they had dropped to one-third and now account for virtually nothing of our business,” says Huang Tong, director of Huang Jiang Oil Painting Company, which works with several galleries in Dafen. The final blow came during China’s three-year COVID-19 shutdown.
Domestic demand
Luckily, China’s rapid urbanization is creating a domestic demand. Displaying a reproduction of a famous painting is the latest chic for China’s newly rich and emerging bourgeoisie. And Dafen’s painters are adapting to meet the demands of these new consumers, gradually adopting a certain Chinese aesthetic.
Some are inspired by the mountain and water landscapes of Shan Shui art, traditionally painted with brush and ink. Local authorities also encourage them to produce original works, seeking to make Dafen a cultural venue in its own right, able to attract real artists and art enthusiasts. And they are investing 100 million yuan (.9 million) to build a large museum on the outskirts of the district. But it’s hard for Dafen to shake off its image as a “copy factory.”
Making a living from your art is everyone’s dream, but our customers aren’t prepared to pay the price for an original work.
“Demand does not encourage originality. Most customers don’t know much about art and still want copies of famous works,” explains Longyi, a painter from central China. “I’d obviously prefer to make originals, but demand is low and I have to find a way to survive.”
Most of the time, buyers don’t even visit the shop, but send the paintings or family photos they would like to see via WeChat messenger. With his eyes darting back and forth between the screen of his tablet and the canvas in front of him, Xuanhui reproduces a field of rapeseed without asking too many questions. “This is the kind of painting I can do in a day. A Chinese customer asked me to do it for 400 yuan (about ).”
Copies worth more than originals
Pale copies of Van Gogh or Picasso still abound in Dafen’s stalls. The casual visitor can pick up a small painting of Chinese landscapes, a bouquet of flowers, a small cat or a portrait of Ronaldo for 25 yuan (). Workshops staffed by assembly-line apprentices have disappeared from Dafen, but painters continue. Often, they do not paint complete replicas; rather the canvas background is usually a print, onto which the painter adds touches of paint.
Dafen’s painters are subject to market law. “Making a living from your art is everyone’s dream, but our customers aren’t prepared to pay the price for an original work,” says gallery owner Huang Tong. Nor is creativity particularly obvious when strolling through the alleys, even though the authorities want to turn Dafen into a true art center.
The COVID-19 years saw many painters packing their bags. Today, the country’s economic difficulties and the real estate crisis are putting a strain on middle-class budgets. “Families have less money to spend on paintings, and prices are miserable,” laments Huang Tong.
In his studio, Zhao continues to paint and sell copies of the Dutch master. The buyers are there for that, rarely for his original works. It’s hard to step out of the master’s shadow for the man they still call the “Chinese Van Gogh”.
*Originally published April 13, 2024, this article was updated January 16, 2025 with enriched media.
