Dafen is a small suburb in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. In its heyday, it produced 60% of the world’s oil paintings, churning out copies of the Mona Lisa and The Starry Night you see in hotel lobbies and restaurants.
We’re in Dafen, a suburb in the Southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Here, you’ll see near-perfect replicas of the Mona Lisa, or The Starry Night.
In its heyday in the 2000s, Dafen produced 60% of the world’s oil painting replicas. You’d see these hung on hotel walls all over the globe. The price of a piece? Less than $15.
“We didn’t learn painting by doing sketches,” said Zhou Yongjiu, one of the first painters who settled here. “The teacher got students to paint just one part of the painting. You drew the same thing every day. Even when you hated drawing it.”
Like him, a lot of painters in the village copied paintings by Van Gogh and Da Vinci for years without knowing who they were. In just 10 years, Zhou watched Dafen grow to house over (a thousand two hundred) 1,200 galleries, and 20,000 painters. But when the 2008 Global Financial Crisis hit, orders from overseas dried up. So Dafen’s painters focused on local buyers and decided to create original works.
Dafen’s painters now do both copies and originals. Copies still do better. Its economy is even improving, thanks to strong domestic demand. One estimate puts Dafen’s sales at over 700 million dollars in 2018, compared to just 44 million in 2005. But better sales have come with a higher cost of living, and younger painters continue to struggle to make ends meet.
