Southern China is the world''s leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day.
A giant hand raises an impressive paintbrush into the sky at the entrance to the art village. The bronze sculpture outside the gates of Dafen in southern China leaves no visitor in doubt as to what the people do here. The "village" is in fact a modern suburb of Shenzhen, a city with 10 million inhabitants northeast of Hong Kong, and it has achieved unexpected fame and relative prosperity. But the city''s ostentatiously advertized success has little to do with creativity: It is based on the reproduction of famous artworks on an industrial scale.
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In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world''s cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen''s four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth �28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container.
Huang Jiang remembers the time when Dafen was really just a village. He came here as the first art-producing entrepreneur 17 years ago. He worked as an errand boy in Hong Kong before he started copying famous art works. Then he crossed the border into China, resolved to open up the first workshop in what was then still a no-man''s land. Wages and rent were low, and the port of Hong Kong was close by. "When I arrived in 1989, there was nothing here besides dirt roads and bamboo," the now 60-year-old businessman remembers. "It was like Siberia for factory owners."
Huang has three identical, gold-colored busts of himself standing in his office. They remind him of better days -- the 1990s, when his business was at the peak of its development. Once he produced 50,000 paintings in a month and a half for Wal-Mart, the US retail giant. He earned as much as �200,000 a year ($256,000) -- a fortune in China. Today the roughly 40 painters he employs earn him only five-digit sums.
The smile displayed by Huang''''s golden likeness no longer graces his own face. He seems tired. The competition is getting to him. His former apprentices have opened up their own workshops all over the neighborhood. Huang''s idea turned out to be as easy to copy as an oil painting. "During the first few years, I was the only one in the business," he complains. "Everything was easier then, but the competition has gotten tough now."