Barry Schwabsky
GOETHE'S NIGHTMARE
In the early years of the twenty-first century, reports began to emerge in the Western press of a 'painting village' in China filled with workers, rather than artists, assiduously painting copies of the masterpieces of Western art as if on an assembly line. In her recent book, Winnie Won Ying Wong recalls some of the headlines: 'Van Gogh from the Sweatshop', 'Chinese Village Paints by Incredible Numbers', 'Van Gogh, Gauguin: Cheaper by the Dozen'. [1] The 'urban village' of Dafen—in reality, a high-rise suburb—lies on the outskirts of Shenzhen, the booming Special Economic Zone across the straits from Hong Kong. Here, in 1989, Huang Jiang, a painter and businessman, set up a workshop employing twenty-six apprentices, mainly teenagers recruited from Fujian or Guangdong. The enterprise was successful and expanded fast, selling its products to American retailers like K-Mart and publishing, as Wong explains, annual catalogues containing over two hundred works: 'French beaux-arts genre scenes, American minimalism, Bouguereau, Thomas Kinkade, and more.' Huang's workshop attracted others, and was soon staffed by thousands of painters. As Wong notes, the annual entrance examination for the Guangdong Academy of Fine Arts attracts 120,000 applicants, of whom only 1,225 are accepted; Dafen offered an alternative for those who had already undergone the rigorous preparation for the Academy's exam as well as artistically inclined young people who never had access to such training. By the time Western visitors began to arrive, Dafen had become to commercial art what Helmand is to heroin, reportedly cranking out more than half the world's supply. By 2007, as Philip Tinari put it in Artforum, the 'village' was 'a dense warren of alleyways and six- and seven-storey concrete buildings, containing nothing but apartments and workshops dedicated to oil painting'.
Western curiosity about Dafen—in which, Wong suggests, anxiety is leavened with condescension—seems to encapsulate myriad concerns about increasing political and economic competition from China, while wrapping them up in issues specific to the aesthetic field: questions about the dialectic between 'original' and 'reproduction' that have been unavoidable since Marcel Duchamp and Walter Benjamin, and others that have been manifest since the birth of modernism: what is painting? Who is an artist? Wong, an assistant professor of rhetoric at Berkeley—this is her first book, based on research for her doctoral dissertation at mit—is well placed to untangle the knot that ties aesthetic and political concerns together at 'the world's largest production centre for hand-painted art products'. She comes armed with a sophisticated understanding of the complexities and contradictions of the discourse of aesthetics, but hers is also a sturdily empirical study, grounded in five years of field work (2006–2010) encompassing not just Dafen but 'production and retail sites throughout China, the United States, and Europe'.
Wong's interest is squarely on the production side. She emphasizes that her methodology encompasses both art-historical and ethnographic aspects. As she explains:
I began my participant observation in 2007 through a typical succession of roles, first approaching the site as an individual consumer, then serving as an interpreter and guide to tourists and buyers (including art historians, curators, and artists). I soon learned to order and sell paintings at a small scale. I then spent several months learning to paint in the workshop of a Van Gogh painter, a typical entry-level training for an aspiring trade painter.
One might wish that she had also investigated the end-consumers of these 'art products'. What do the people who hang copies of Van Gogh in their homes think of them? How do they choose? Likewise, a deeper sense of the social background of the men and women who make up the workforce of Dafen would have been helpful. Wong characterizes these 'provincials who faithfully desire the meritorious centre' as rural migrants, excluded from legal residence in China's cities; but beyond this, she gives little sense of either the individual trajectories that brought them to Dafen or the larger social and economic shifts that conditioned their life choices.
More than most art historians or ethnographers, however, Wong is able to follow the implications of her research into the more rarefied realms of cultural theory and philosophical aesthetics. As one who has come to know the art and the business of 'trade painting' from the inside, as well as through research and theory, Wong evinces a noticeable disdain for earlier commentators whose observations she finds superficial. At times this can be self-defeating, as when she airily dismisses the idea that contemporary art copying might be related to an age-old tradition in Chinese painting—she even encloses the word 'tradition' in scare quotes—but in doing so merely draws attention to the fact that the aesthetic concepts she uses are overwhelmingly of European origin. At the same time, Wong's empathy for the working painters of Dafen, as she takes their side against 'two sets of privileged authors—contemporary artists and the Chinese party-state', only sharpens her book's keen polemical edge.
Van Gogh on Demand begins with a description of an official Copying Competition held at Dafen in 2004, in which over a hundred painters were given three and a half hours to copy an 1883 portrait by Ilya Repin, forerunner of socialist realism, depicter of the Volga boatmen and—for Clement Greenberg in 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch'—the personification of everything that modernism meant to bury: 'Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.' The Copying Competition, as Wong says, 'appears at first blush to be surreal, absurd, and almost tragi-comic'. Her aim, however, is to reframe the event—and first-blush responses to Dafen in general—by showing that, just as the Chinese seem to misuse Repin, so too do Westerners appear 'primed to misunderstand the complexity of such use'. She does so in order to pose a provocative question:
Do China's highly productive uses of Western history and culture lay claim to an alternative modernist legacy—Western art history (or socialism, or capitalism) with 'Chinese characteristics'? Or does it in fact represent a broader, and even universal fulfilment of modernism's most avant-garde ideals?
In other words: should China's late-twentieth-century development be seen as a new local inflection of universal ideals, articulated in the West since the eighteenth century—'West as precedent and East as follower', as Wong phrases it elsewhere—or rather as portending the genesis of a new universality, to which its Western sources (Kant, Marx, or what you will) should be seen as mere tributaries?
As Wong points out, the modern notion of art emerged in the late eighteenth century, alongside Adam Smith's analysis of the division of labour and the shifting relations of production embodied in the industrial revolution. In his 1797 essay 'Art and Handicraft', Goethe warned that industrialization would affect even the fine arts, conjuring the incubus of a 'great painting factory' whose immense productivity would merely reflect the anonymous mass of 'the common herd' who would consume its products. Wong suggests that in Goethe's lifetime something like this 'painting factory' might already have existed in Guangzhou, where by that time paintings were already being produced in quantity for foreign export.
Goethe's nightmare returned to haunt Western accounts of Dafen, which told of paintings being produced on Fordist assembly lines. According to Wong, such practices are rare; where they occur, they are often loosely organized by friends who find that, faced with a large commission, 'it might be tongkuai (fast and fun) to get the order done together'. Though bosses, brokers and wholesalers like to accumulate prestige by boasting to visitors of their massive factories and minutely ordered production systems, in general painters 'control their own work processes, time, and space'; either they paint the works themselves or they subcontract them to a network of independent studios, which may be staffed by a small group or just a single painter. The 'great painting factory' of Dafen turns out to be no more like a manufacturing plant than was Warhol's Factory in Manhattan—though both undoubtedly house complications for accepted understandings of the circumstances under which art might be produced. Rather than deskilling, Wong contends that the division of labour has led the painters to broader concerns about skill, craft, authenticity and individuality.
While they also produce 'free paintings' on spec, the replicas of existing imagery for which the Dafen painters are best known are made with reference to a gao, an 'image source' supplied without any contextualizing information (even the size of the original). Producing as many as a dozen copies a day, the painters soon eschew the gao, working entirely from memory. In replicating the image, they are not concerned with a detailed reproduction of it. Skill is valued, but measured in other ways. 'Stop looking at the gao', painters exhort their apprentices, echoing the anti-academic directives of late-nineteenth-century Paris; speed and spontaneity rather than exactitude are what make for good painting, not to mention a good income. An experienced painter tells Wong he's stopped doing Impressionists and returned to making Van Goghs—generally considered an easy task for beginners—'because it does not require the extra step of mixing paint'. Warhol, who was always looking for ways to decrease the labour involved in painting, would have nodded in appreciation.
While Warhol did not live long enough to think of outsourcing his production to Dafen, his artistic descendants have taken the hint. Just as journalists were becoming intrigued, Chinese as well as European and American artists began visiting Dafen and contracting with its painters in order to produce works that would be exhibited under their own names at the Venice Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial and Art Basel, to name just a few. At times Wong can barely contain her contempt for the condescension of visiting artists, who imagine themselves to be 'elevating' the factory artists of Dafen through their conceptual projects. To some extent she gives herself an easy target by taking these endeavours as her exemplars of the international art world; while she rightly treats the conceptualism that derives from the Duchampian readymade as the main current of contemporary art, most of the projects that have involved Dafen trade painting sound like naïvely academic spin-offs. The most engaging of those she describes is precisely the one that dissembles its conceptual underpinnings: a series of purportedly documentary images taken at Dafen by Michael Wolf, an 'American-born, German-trained, and Hong Kong-based photographer'. These are portraits showing Dafen painters with their replicas of contemporary artworks by the likes of Gerhard Richter, On Kawara or William Eggleston, each titled with a number, the name of the copied artist and the price of the copy: #11, Ed Ruscha, $7; or #7, Francis Bacon, $102. The Chinese painters remain unnamed.
Researching another Dafen-based conceptual project, Christian Jankowski's China Painters, Wong meets Yin Xunshi, whom she recognizes as one of the painters depicted by Wolf. Yin tells her that he alone painted most of the art works in Wolf's photographs, and that the people portrayed in them are friends of his who had nothing to do with making them. He is surprised to learn that the photographs were made for exhibition; apparently it had not occurred to him that they were anything but souvenirs. But he is hardly miffed. 'Seeing in me a potential copy of one of his best customers', writes Wong, 'Yin remarked more than once that I could also order paintings from him and make some new photographs à la Wolf.' In her view, Wolf's project is conceptual art masquerading as documentary—she cites Walid Raad's work as The Atlas Group as a parallel. Yet the process relies on dissimulating Yin's authorship—apparently no problem for Yin—and reproducing Western assumptions about the Chinese as copyists indifferent to what they copy. At the same time, the whole chain of coincidence on which the story is built seems suspiciously novelistic; after first wondering to what extent Yin's account could be taken as veracious, I began to suspect that the whole tale could be Wong's invention: is there really a photographer named Michael Wolf who worked at Dafen? A Google search reassured me. Wong's virtuosity in tracking multiple levels of misprision lies precisely in the extent to which she succeeds in arousing scepticism, even toward her own words, rather than lulling the reader into an easy confidence. She points out that the Chinese word for 'translator'—a role she sometimes played in Dafen—means 'someone who literally makes the business doable', and that this can entail strategically encouraging sufficient misunderstanding to keep two parties with conflicting needs satisfied: finding a way 'for each party to see in the project what each required'.
All scepticism stops somewhere, however. At times Wong—as she 'translates' Dafen for her readers—seems to believe she has found an Archimedean point from which to account for all the complementary misunderstandings, without remainder. If there is a blind spot here, it has to do with what she habitually designates as Romanticism, imagined as a realm of (possibly necessary) illusion and self-deception, 'an untenable idea' which enables the painter 'to labour away with the conception that he is an independent artist or artisan, while allowing the consumer to trust that the painting he has bought may well be the work of an independent artist or artisan'. Wong notes in her conclusion that, lurking among the Dafen painters, the conceptual artists and the Chinese Communist Party functionaries who hope to use their 'creativity' for propaganda purposes, is 'the Romantic paradigm of "true art", with its attendant apparatus of auto-genesis, individuality, and romantic love'—this latter emerging as a topos in Chinese television films set in Dafen, which Wong analyses in her least engaging chapter. And yet, as in a theatrical farce in which the happy ending is brought about precisely by all the protagonists working at cross-purposes to each other, it is through their departure from this paradigm that something is accomplished by their interaction. 'When a hidden amanuensis is revealed under the aegis of Romanticism, it would seem an outrage—as if signing one's name on something someone else has painted was fraudulent', she suggests. Yet 'in the "contemporary" context (the context in which the romance of the studio was dismantled along with the cult of individuality, the fetish of aura, and the myth of originality), it appears somehow canny and ironic, as if it has overturned a narrative or set up a paradox.'
What Wong overlooks is that irony and paradox, theatrical dissembling and collaborative ebullience are just as much a part of the Romantic constellation as sincerity and individuality, if not more so—think of Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship in the theatre, or the paeans to irony in Schlegel's fragments. Around Dafen, fictions and ironies multiply. And in a globalized economy, the precious creative self begins to lose its aura of uniqueness: 'Everywhere we find our own doppelgangers', Wong writes, 'for everywhere we can find replacements for our labour'. What is more a creature of the Romantic era than a doppelganger? It is a tribute to the way that Wong enters into this spirit of irony that in places, as in the account of Wolf, I began to suspect her of crossing the line between scholarship and fable. At one point a Dafen painter offers to write Wong's dissertation for her—after all, he knows more about the subject than she does and, as it turns out, he is also an experienced ghost writer of internal policy documents for local Party officials. The encounter leads her to reflect that the ethic proper to her academic calling means she must internalize the very 'Romance' she is deconstructing, for 'the contemporary writer, like the contemporary artist, is deeply embedded in a market of the self', a self that should not be supplemented by another's labour. It is undoubtedly true that, as Wong points out, 'the delegation, substitution and replacement of one person's hand with another's is all the more disarming when it's unvexed', as it is in Dafen. But once it comes within the purview of an investigator or a theorist, some vexation is bound to arise.
Wong never registers an aesthetic judgment of taste; she never says that Dafen painting in general is art, or that a particular Dafen painting is a work of art. She merely claims that everything Dafen painters do is done in conditions 'exactly like' (her italics) 'the flexible, specialized and bespoke mode of global production in which contemporary artists function'. And that's all it takes for her to tax with prejudice all those 'who are sure in their knowledge that Dafen painting is "not art".' In her telling, Dafen painting might be said to be conducting a kind of unwitting psychoanalysis of Western aesthetics. For every assertion made about creativity, reproduction, authorship, collaboration, authenticity, spontaneity or method, it seems to simply repeat the same idea in the form of a question. After Paul Gauguin, it asks, 'In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists?' After Sol LeWitt, it asks, 'The fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the better?' After Joseph Beuys, it asks, 'Everyone is an artist?' The practices of the painters of Dafen may serve to deconstruct established notions of authorship, originality, art and their opposites, as Wong suggests; but if what makes art conceptual is—as she believes—that it involves the production, not just of paintings or any other sort of art object, but more importantly of a properly 'artistic self' or 'authorial persona', then we are still well and truly in the grip of a Romantic Bildungsroman. A rural Chinese migrant who has never had any chance of entering an art academy or even of obtaining a permit for legal urban residency in a city like Shenzhen is unlikely to be able to forge such a self or persona, but perhaps equally unlikely to resent this. That's what it means to have an 'unvexed' relation to the act or art of copying. Wong, in resenting it on his behalf, is a true daughter of the Romantics.
[1] Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2014, $35 320 pp, 978 0226 02489 9
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