Framed Authors: Photography and Conceptual Art from Dafen Village
Originality is central to modernity’s artistic practices as well as its commercial ones. Through originality, artistic developments are marked, creativity is recognized, and innovation commodified. Yet it is through copies that we consume the original, and, hence, to tell the story of an original object is also to tell micro-histories of its multiple, repeatable, and dis-singular origins. Since 1989, Dafen village, located outside the border of China’s Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, has been the global production center for handmade oil paintings, supplying Western consumer markets with mass-produced copies of paintings sourced from the Western canon. More recently, assisted by governmental policies promoting cultural industries, Dafen’s painters, entrepreneurs, and administrators have embarked upon a transition towards original and creative production. The drama of originality and the copy play out in the scene set by today’s Dafen village.
in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 7:4, 2008
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