James Fallows has two interesting entries on "art factory villages" in China. Worth clicking, there’s some good pictures.
The main point is: in one sprawling area are many hundreds of individual art factories, in which teams of artists crank out hand-painted replicas of any sort of picture you can imagine. European old masters. Andy Warhol. Gustav Klimt. Classic Chinese landscapes. Manet. Audubon. Botero. The super-hot and faddish contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun, whose paintings and sculptures all feature people wearing enormous grins. Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of Light." Walter Keane, the "Painter of Mawkish Big-Eyed Kids."
This and more is on sale, priced more or less by the square meter. We saw suppliers delivering huge rolls of canvas, to be converted into "commodity art" -- which is what the English sign on one store said.
We weren’t in Shenzhen long, so we definitely miss Dafen, the art factory village he’s talking about. The phenomenon isn’t quite so pronounced in art districts in the big city, although I do recall some shops that were similarly loaded with paintings.
Instead the main thing I remember are fake art students. My guidebook regularly warned me against them. They hung out at major tourist spots, including within the Forbidden City and told me about this art show that featured some of their work. Essentially they were just hawkers with more than average English skill. They’d lead you to an overpriced shop. I never hit one myself, but I was rather surprised to see an "art exhibit" was in the Forbidden City itself. I guess it was rented out just like the other museum shops.
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