Chinese paintings

There has been a lot of attention paid to Chinese art lately. Contemporary Chinese art is certainly hot, hot, hot... Cai Guo-Qiang's show at the Guggenheim, for example. We Make Money Not Art has a recent big post about Chinese contemporary art.

But today, I'm writing about Chinese art-in-bulk that's being pumped out by assembly-line painters.

Back in December, The Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows wrote about his visit to the Dafen "art factory village" outside Shenzhen, in southern China. (The above photo is Fallow's).


YouTube has an (embeddable) tv news segment on the village.

A organization called Regional claims that 60% of the world's paintings come from Dafen. Boing Boing has a posting about an interesting project that Regional is doing in Dafen. (Unfortunately Regional's website is currently down, probably due to the traffic overload that often comes with a Boing Boing link).

Regional productively collaborated with the otherwise commoditized community in Dafen by asking selected individuals, some for the first time, to imagine themselves in their professional medium. The final works show the technical, creative, and professional facets of the artists identities subsumed by the styles and relationships they maintain with specific famous artists. The hybrid result of original subject with derivative style comments on originality, global cultural production and Regional's cooperation with emerging enterprise forms that are internationalizing the village

One of Edward Winkleman's recent postings (about when an artist and gallery goes separate ways) has a comment:

Anonymous said...

I love reading the comments on this blog.
I've never jumped in before but here goes…I show with several galleries. I sell maybe a dozen paintings a year. I was a little sick of the artist /gallery paradigm. So I rethought and reconstructed how I work. I still do the museum installations and participate in group and solo shows but I also manufacture a separate body of work in China. I have 10,000 paintings (one container) arriving in July and another in early Sept. They are all bought and I can relax for a bit.

4/18/2008 09:05:00 PM