These tales are drawn from fieldwork conducted from 2008 to 2015 in Dafen village, China, the world’s largest production center for hand-painted oil paintings. All of the names, facts, and dates were true at the time of the telling, which in some cases spanned interactions over some months or years. Readers may refer to my book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (2014), for a scholarly account of Dafen village that strived to put such self-accounts into scholarly historical and artistic contexts. These tales, by contrast, record the stories of artists as they were narrated to me. They demonstrate how the most exceptionalist ideas of art are found anywhere, even in the most unexceptional places.
in Collateral: Cross-Cultural Close Reading, Cluster No. 29, 2021
read online here