Dafen Village
Dafen (Chinese :大 芬 社区Dafen shequ ) is a community population of road district in Buji town of Longgang District of Shenzhen prefecture-level city in south China's Guangdong Province. It developed within a few years the world's largest workshop for copied oil paintings.
The coastal village of Dafen
Since the inhabitants of the former Community Dafen " Dafen village " (大 芬 村) has emerged of the former large village Buji, as a village (Chinese cun ), it is still often referred to. Buji is located only seven kilometers from Hong Kong. It has an area of 30.89 km ², of which the " artist village" Dafen about four takes.
History
20 years ago, a poor village, Dafen has now developed into a modern community of Shenzhen residents. Dafen is also called " artists' village " because export more here than 10,000 junior painters and 2000 talented artists in over 300 workshops about five million paintings in the world. This probably corresponds to about 50 percent of global production with a value of about close to 30 million euros. The majority consists of mass production known masterpieces, mostly the same motif in large numbers.
Huang Jiang
The foundation of this success continued, now over 60 years old Huang Jiang, the Dafen in the first workshop founded for copying famous works of art in 1989. Low rental and labor costs allowed his workshop a growth spurt.
However, it only took a few years for some of its employees be copied model and opened their own workshops. Today, only about 40 painters working for him and generate tens of thousands of euros per year.
Painting in the chord
In order to produce large quantities in a short time, they will be prepared as on the assembly line. Every painter has a color and goes from one image to the next, as soon as he has done his part. Are produced these copies of painters without academic training. Customers are mainly goods and furniture chains from America and Europe.
Meanwhile, many graduates come from the best art school in China by Dafen. These create creative artists working only a few images and still come to a monthly salary of more than a thousand euros. This is between three and ten times more than an assembly line copier gets. Fixed wages there are not, will be paid according to the number of copies made. For Chinese standards enough that it earned money to live well and to save even a little. A special incentive is the free work schedule for many artists. Per day creates a chord painter 20-30 images.
Legal gray area
Although it is officially banned in China to copy artists who are not at least 50 years dead, hardly anyone cares about. For stencil artists usually counts only the fulfillment of an order and the customer's satisfaction.
The most copied artist
The most copied " Old Masters " are William Adolphe Bouguereau, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Marc Chagall, John Constable, Salvador Dali, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Gustav Klimt, Édouard Manet, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Thomas Moran, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and John William Waterhouse.