From Spiegel Online:
Southern China is the world’s leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year — most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day.
A giant hand raises an impressive paintbrush into the sky at the entrance to the art village. The bronze sculpture outside the gates of Dafen in southern China leaves no visitor in doubt as to what the people do here. The “village” is in fact a modern suburb of Shenzhen, a city with 10 million inhabitants northeast of Hong Kong, and it has achieved unexpected fame and relative prosperity. But the city’s ostentatiously advertized success has little to do with creativity: It’s based on the reproduction of famous artworks on an industrial scale. [Full text]
See also a slideshow of Dafen from Der Spiegel.
