Original copies: Philip Tinari on the Dafen Oil Painting Village

ArtForum, Oct, 2007 by Philip Tinari

While this goal may sound risible, miniature Dafens in fact pervade the Chinese art world. Departing from the more traditional studio system now in vogue--whereby most senior painters employ teams of young assistants who are recent graduates of the art academies--a number of midcareer artists have taken advantage of the fact that paintings in China can be fabricated with ease and in bulk, and have incorporated Dafen-inspired techniques into their own conceptual practices. Take Yan Lei, an artist whose early conceptual works included a mischievous mail-art project, done in collaboration with Hong Hao, that involved sending fake invitations to Documenta 10 to a hundred Beijing artists. These days, Yan's output consists largely of paintings based on digital photographs printed onto canvas and, in a knowing nod to Baldessari, painted out by assistants, many of whom have no background in art at all. Or take Yang Yong, perhaps Shenzhen's best-known "real" artist, who made his name with photos of women posing like fashion models at construction sites, before shifting to the production of brightly colored, photo-based, thoroughly Dafen-esque realist paintings. After a long day roaming the village, I visited his studio, adjacent to that of Urbanus in the city's high-art enclave in the tree-lined Overseas Chinese Town district. There, assistants struggled to adjust a projected image of an airport so that it filled the canvas onto which it would be painted. To its left hung a purple-hued painting, completed just a few days earlier, of a foot kicking a ball: a Pix2Oils transfer of a still from Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's Zidane.

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PHILIP TINARI IS A WRITER BASED IN BEIJING. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

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