James Fallows writes on Atlantic.com about the “art factory village” Dafen outside Shenzhen:
I had heard a lot about Dafen, including in a very good story by Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune early this year. (The story seems no longer to be on the Tribune’s site. For reference, it was published on February 13, 2007.) But only this weekend did I see it, guided by Liam Casey, the Irish “Mr. China” I described a few months ago in an article about Shenzhen’s more conventional factories. Now that I’ve seen it — my lord!
The main point is: in one sprawling area are many hundreds of individual art factories, in which teams of artists crank out hand-painted replicas of any sort of picture you can imagine. European old masters. Andy Warhol. Gustav Klimt. Classic Chinese landscapes. Manet. Audubon. Botero. The super-hot and faddish contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun, whose paintings and sculptures all feature people wearing enormous grins. Thomas Kinkade, the “Painter of Light.” Walter Keane, the “Painter of Mawkish Big-Eyed Kids.” [Full text]
[Image via The Atlantic]
