Original copies: Philip Tinari on the Dafen Oil Painting Village

ArtForum, Oct, 2007 by Philip Tinari

Jankowski is certainly not the first painter to outsource labor for conceptual ends, though his gesture takes on a particular political inflection in an era marked by the globalization of both the art world and industrial production. Marcel Duchamp famously used a sign painter in the execution of his final painting, the great Tu m', 1918; and, perhaps more apposite, in John Baldessari's twelve "Commissioned Paintings" of 1969-70, the artist hired painters he had found at a county fair to depict photographs he had taken of a hand pointing at ordinary objects--images that made reference to Al Held's assertion that "all conceptual art is just pointing at things." Once the hands had been rendered on canvas, a sign painter added text crediting each work to the Baldessari "employee" who had created it. Dafen is essentially that county fair to the umpteenth power, as Jankowski's project suggests, and the figure of the sign painter--an anonymous technician who executes a project conceived by someone else--is perhaps the metaphor most actively at play in this village. Yet the idiosyncratic visions of the various participants in "The China Painters" effectively elaborate on the agency of the "sign painter," thereby complicating the default narrative of Dafen as an assembly line.

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The individual stories of most Dafen painters do the same. Take, for example, He Liangfeng. Born in 1980, he graduated from the Shaoxing Arts and Literature College in the southeastern province of Zhejiang. Seven years ago, after a brief stint as a high school art teacher, he set up his stall in Dafen with his wife, Wu Xiaoling, also a Shaoxing graduate. Today the couple employs five painters in a facility a brief walk from the center of the village. He sees himself as an artist rather than as a craftsman, and is proud of the way his renderings of works by famous artists depart from their sources. Showing me recent paintings on his computer (which runs a counterfeit version of Windows XP, as does nearly every artist's computer on which I've viewed works since 2002), he pointed to a group in the style of Wang Yuping, a Central Academy professor and member of the early-'90s "New Generation" group, known for his neo-expressionist paintings of fish. "You see," he said, flipping through the images, "this is not actually a copy of a work by Wang Yuping, but an innovation on him. Among Wang Yuping's fish you will not find this fish!" But he was proudest of another painting, copied from the Chinese artist Liu Ye, a Dafen favorite whose cartoonish images of young girls and bunnies intently staring at iconic modernist paintings were on view at Sperone Westwater in New York last fall. He had edited a well-known Liu picture of a girl about to slaughter a pig, replacing her knife with a handful of vegetables. "It's much happier like this," he informed me. "Customers prefer it this way."