China paints a new commercial world of art

Yang Chao Fu has a half-finished painting taped to the wall of his small shop on the outskirts of Shenzhen. As he speaks, he leans back on stacked piles of completed canvasses, while others hang above him – pastoral vistas, galloping horses, angels, Parisian street scenes.

But Mr. Yang is no starving artist. Outside on the pavement, six more oil paintings hint that Mr. Yang has little but money as his muse, like most of the other owners of so-called galleries here. Each canvas laid flat on the ground is identical – a vase with purple and white flowers – and each corresponds to one of the many photographs scattered across Mr. Yang’s desk. These images were sent by a gallery owner in France, who has ordered 200 such paintings at roughly $26 (Canadian) apiece.

“I’m sure he’ll sell them for at least 100 [$137],” Mr. Yang says as he leans up against a stack of oil paintings produced by his artists-for-hire – which include impressionists, realists and those who excel at classical Chinese painting. “I have about 10 workers who paint for me, who work everyday. They get paid by the painting.”

There are about 1,100 stores like Mr. Yang’s here in Dafen village, which has grown since the late 1980s from a small community of 300 people on the outskirts of Shenzhen into a bustling nexus for a global trade in oil paintings. Though far removed from the fine-art auctions of Hong Kong, the flurry of commerce in Dafen is one of the most brazen manifestations so far of the world’s appetite for buying Chinese art.

This so-called “village” is now on Shenzhen’s subway system, employs about 6,000 painters and is located only a few hundred feet from a gigantic Wal-Mart – a fitting commercial signpost for this market of pre-painted Van Goghs, celebrity portraits (mostly Chinese politicians), classical Chinese paintings and renditions of modern Chinese painters’ now-iconic styles, such as the wide-mouthed cartoonish grins of artist Yue Minjun.

Tucked inside a tiny cubby hole painting space, 31-year-old Bao Jin Song explains that the buyers roaming past the framers and government-erected statues of European artists in the alleyways and streets here vary widely. Some are members of the middle class or the Chinese nouveau riche, who are interested in custom-painted family portraits to hang on the walls of their new suburban houses; others are hoteliers seeking oil paintings in volume, or business people interested in festooning their workplaces with portraits of Chinese leaders.

When Mr. Bao arrived here in 2004 after graduating with an undergraduate degree in painting, Dafen was a simple village, and success wasn’t assured despite the government’s obvious interest in promoting it as a tourist site. Now, as he dabs his brush at a mock Mona Lisa and people drift by into nearby cafés and restaurants, casually inspecting massive gold frames and paintings, Mr. Bao says he enjoys the steady hours and regular work that come with Dafen’s unapologetic concentration on profiting from art.

“I live across the street from Wal-Mart – I come here and paint during the day so people know I do it,” Mr. Bao says. “When I’m painting by myself – not for orders – I also paint what I think would sell.”

And sell it does. In 2010, the industrial-strength painting output of “Dafen Oil Painting Village,” as the government refers to it, reached 550 million yuan – roughly $86-million. Spinoff and related industries in the district were double that, at around 1.2 billion yuan. More than 60 per cent of the orders come from foreigners.