Dafen Oil Painting Village

Dafen is a neighbourhood in Shenzhen's Longgang District that became, in the 1990s, the world's largest production centre for copied oil paintings. A Hong Kong art dealer opened a workshop there in 1989, training migrant workers from inland provinces to reproduce van Gogh, Monet and Rembrandt from prints; at the peak in the mid-2000s, more than 8,000 painters in Dafen produced an estimated 60 percent of the world's oil-painting copies. Painters worked in assembly lines - one did skies, one faces, one backgrounds - with unit prices starting at five US dollars. As digital reproduction grew and wages rose, the industry shrank and many painters moved to original work. Walking through the village today you see open studios where hundreds of sunflower replicas are drying, with galleries showing genuine contemporary Chinese art mixed in between.