Art from the factory: In China, van Gogh's sunflowers are copied on an assembly line

In a labyrinth of streets and narrow alleys, shop after shop is crammed from top to bottom with oil paintings. Picasso's "Dora Maar" leans half over Rembrandt's self-portrait and Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa", next to which hang portraits of Mao Zedong, George W. Bush senior, Deng Xiaoping and Donald Trump, in between there are pandas, brightly colored sunrises, Spider-Man, van Gogh's sunflowers and then again Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring".

The mix is ​​adventurous. The painters sit on colorful plastic chairs in the little space left and work on their paintings. We are in China, in the northeast of Shenzhen in the Longgang district, more precisely in the Dafen Oil Painting Village.

The term "village" is somewhat misleading, as Dafen is well connected to the metropolis of Shenzhen. The district is considered to have the largest art industry in the world. Between 5,000 and 10,000 painters from all over China are based here, although the number is constantly changing. In recent years, frame makers and dealers of art supplies have also settled here. But the core of the community are the painters who create copies of Western masterpieces on an assembly line basis.

The official rule is that only works whose authors have been dead for more than fifty years are copied. Because of copyright. But if customers commission a work from a living artist, then you can assume that it will be delivered.

"We not only copy every detail of a picture, but also capture its soul," is the slogan. The copies, made by hand with oil paints, are so convincing and so inexpensive that customers from all over the world order them. Large furniture stores, supermarkets, art galleries, hotels, conference centers, wholesalers, souvenir shops from America and Europe, especially from the Netherlands and Germany, are regular buyers of Dafen art reproductions.

The most frequently copied artists are probably van Gogh, Picasso and Monet. According to estimates, in the mid-2000s, at the peak of Dafen art production, around 60 percent of the oil paintings sold worldwide came from Dafen. In 2015, annual sales are said to have been around 65 million dollars.

But the dealers' margins are high. The figures conceal how little money the painters make locally. They live in extremely precarious conditions and earn an average of 2.50 euros per painting, which is only a tiny fraction of the selling price abroad. When a large order comes in, for example 6,000 sunflower paintings by Van Gogh that have to be ready for delivery to Amsterdam within twenty days, the painters work non-stop, around the clock.

Nine of them sleep, paint and eat in the same room. Hundreds of finished paintings hang close together from the ceiling to dry. The air is filled with the smell of oil paints, mixed with sweat, cigarette smoke, food smells and other indefinable smells. The nine painters in the room divide up the sections of the sunflower paintings in a sophisticated process: one paints just the background, another the vase, another just the flowers, another the leaves and so on.

It is like a production line in a factory. In this way, nine painters produce 300 hand-painted copies in one day. The finished picture ends up in the countless souvenir shops around the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it sells for between 30 and 200 euros, depending on the size and framing.

This effective assembly line work was thought up by the founder of Dafen Village: Huang Jiang. In 1989, Shenzhen was a small town in southern China on the Pearl River Delta, just two hours by train from the thriving metropolis of Hong Kong. Rent and living here were affordable. The entrepreneur and painter Huang Jiang moved from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to try his luck. He settled in Dafen with around twenty other painters. They copied the great western masters as a finger exercise.

China had only opened up to Western art and literature a few years earlier. Chinese artists eagerly absorbed everything, experimented and copied all art movements from Impressionism to Cubism and Dadaism to the Readymade. More as a joke and on impulse, Huang Jiang sent some copies to the Walmart office in America and asked if they were interested.

What he didn't expect was that he received an order for over 50,000 paintings, which he was to produce and deliver within forty days. To accomplish this task, he enlisted all twenty of his fellow painters in Dafen and invented the piecework process mentioned above. They managed the workload. That was the beginning of the Oil Painting Village Dafen.

In China, there is a fundamentally different understanding of copy and original. Repeated copying of great masterpieces has always been common practice in classical art education. The European cult of the uniqueness of the original, according to which it is considered pure and unchangeable and, conversely, every copy must be inferior and despicable, is alien to China. According to Far Eastern philosophy, creation is not a singular act, but a process that is subject to permanent transformation.

The difference between the ways of thinking is already clearly evident in the language. In Chinese, original is called "zhenji" (真跡), literally translated as "authentic trace". The concept of a trace that something leaves behind is inherently a process and a change. Every original is subject to constant change. Time takes its toll on it; the older it is, the paler the colors become, and the image carrier becomes brittle.

Not only that: the more famous the painting is, the more it is actively changed. Chinese collectors of classic scroll paintings love to write poems or comments on the original scroll and leave their red name seal next to it. As the Berlin philosopher Byung-Chul Han impressively demonstrates, they leave their mark on the paintings. On famous masterpieces, you can sometimes find five different calligraphies from different eras. Imagine if the respective owners of Cézanne's "The Card Players" had scribbled their comments and thoughts on the front of the painting over the centuries - unthinkable in Europe!

In China, there are two different terms for the Western idea of ​​a copy. Fangzhipin (仿製品) are obvious reproductions that are meant to be recognizable as such. Smaller versions of the Terracotta Warriors or the Nefertiti bust, for example, fall into this category. They are often of inferior quality to the original in terms of material and color. Fuzhipin (複製品), on the other hand, are perfect copies that are almost indistinguishable from the original.

The man-sized terracotta warriors, for example, which are equal to the original in size and quality, are Fuzhipin. For the Chinese, they are equal to the original. They have no problem exhibiting Fuzhipin in museums in order to protect the older originals.

Into which of these categories do the copied van Goghs and Vermeers from Dafen belong? Of course they cannot replace the original in the museum, that is clear. But they are not just cheap reprints either. The hand-painted copied oil paintings follow in the tradition of a counterfeiting industry that emerged in the Shenzhen region around the turn of the millennium and which has its own new name: Shanzhai.

Around the city of Shenzhen, numerous counterfeits of famous branded goods were produced in small mountain villages. It all started with counterfeit cell phones. Nokia became Nokir, Samsung became Samsing. This gave rise to a real Shanzhai culture. Shanzhai refers to obvious imitations that are a little subversive, a little parody.

The word "shanzhai" (山寨) originally means "mountain fortress" and refers to a classic in Chinese literature from the 14th century. "The Robbers of Liang Shan" tells the story of rebels who rebel against an incompetent government and corrupt officials. They find refuge in a mountain village. Like Robin Hood, they rob the rich to support the poor.

The Shanzhai products suggest nothing else: They copy expensive brand models and make them affordable for the general public. Those who buy them are not only getting a bargain, but are also rebelling against the powerful brand corporations and ultimately against their own authoritarian government.

This heroism is of course only the romantic side of the immense problem of industrial espionage and product piracy. Both damage the international economy and the trust in China as a credible business partner. Shanzhai products are feared and hated by brand manufacturers. But there are also international designers who celebrate the new, optimized counterfeits as creative and innovative.

Dafen Village has survived the corona pandemic, even though orders from abroad have declined since then. The painters now also offer painting workshops and are increasingly working for Chinese customers. Mao portraits, mountain landscapes, and still lifes of fruit and flowers are in demand.

Dafen founder Huang Jiang is now over 80 years old. He still lives in Dafen, but he no longer produces his own work. He is now an agent for other painters. He says in an interview that there is no longer any big money to be made from copies. He dreams of turning the "painting workers", as the painters here call themselves, into real artists who produce their own works: original pictures.