Original copies: Philip Tinari on the Dafen Oil Painting Village

ArtForum, Oct, 2007 by Philip Tinari

Appropriately enough, more complicated, nuanced, and, occasionally, problematic responses to Dafen might be found outside the media in the work of other artists. Chinese artist Liu Ding offered his take on the village, Samples from the Transition--Products, 2005, at the Second Guangzhou Triennial. (The exhibition's thematic focus was the Pearl River Delta, which includes Shenzhen.) For this project, Liu hired a group of artists from Dafen and set them to work on a three-tiered wooden stage. The thirteen participants painted furiously throughout the triennial's opening, producing copy upon copy of the same painting--a fluorescent waterfall-and-tree landscape starring two alighting cranes. The hierarchy implied by the tiers admitted that Dafen's workers are not an undifferentiated population, but individuals participating in a system that offers some hope of advancement. It also obliquely mocked the implicit hierarchies to which artists on the biennial circuit are themselves subject. However, because the painters were displayed for an international audience like so many sideshow performers, possessing neither voice nor agency, the work could be charged with veering again toward the stereotype of the mindless minion--and if Liu was taking up the problem of exploitation here, he was doing so by brushing a bit too close to exploitation himself. The pictures produced at the triennial were later exhibited at Frankfurt's L.A. Galerie, framed in gold and hung floor to ceiling on bright red walls; visitors could contemplate them while perched on elaborately upholstered furniture. This presentation was apparently intended to critique both Chinese fantasies of opulence and European fantasies of China. But here again, things seemed too simple: Dafen "readymades," sanctioned as art through their presence in the gallery, like any number of post-Duchampian ploys.

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Dafen's question for the "real art world" seems to be less about the boundaries of "real" art than about the specificities of its production--a question to which Christian Jankowski's "China Painters," shown earlier this year at Maccarone in New York, offers a more sophisticated answer. The artist's interest in Dafen was piqued by an article in a Hong Kong newspaper; having learned that a museum was under construction in the village, he traveled there to meet the architects and to photograph the site. He then showed the photos to seventeen local artists and asked each to create, in effect, a painting-within-a-painting: Each was commissioned to render a view of the museum's interior (entirely based on the selected photo) as though it were hung with an imaginary canvas of his or her own devising. The stark differences among the resultant paintings reveal the variety of mind-sets and aesthetics to be found in the village. One painter chose a brightly lit wall on which to hang an image of a three-legged jade urn based on a picture he had come across in an old Christie's Hong Kong catalogue. Another placed Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People in a dark corner obscured by scaffolding--a not-so-subtle political critique of the regime. Perhaps the most innovative of the bunch fantasized an image that could symbolize Dafen as it is viewed by the Communist Party: a "sexy painting machine" (per the work's title), shaped like a woman's left leg and breast, spewing out a portrait of Salvador Dali. Some of the canvases were signed by the actual painters, but all were sold as work by Jankowski. And like most Dafen paintings, they were completed, covered with a layer of cellophane, rolled up, and sent by courier to their destination, all within a few weeks of being commissioned.