Dafen

Dafen is a suburb of the Chinese city of Shenzhen, located 30 km from Hong Kong. It is a neighborhood where more than 10 000 painters work to make copies of paintings for everyone. History

The founder of this "Villa of Painters" was Huang Jiang, a smart businessman who came to Dafen in 1989 looking for a quiet place where he could take care of the large orders of thousands of paintings made by the large American commercial areas such as Wal -Mart.

The son of an art teacher, she began painting commissions for European millionaires. At first it took a couple of days per box, which sold for two euros. Afterwards he gained mastery and managed to finish them in just one hour.

Huang has made about 12 paintings a day for more than 20 years, making a total of more than 100,000 paintings, thus possibly the most prolific author in history. A fence surrounds the five square kilometers of Dafen, its half-dozen European-style cobbled streets, 800 art galleries and cafeterias, a factory with thousands of workshops where you can order around $ 35 replicas from Picasso, Leonardo, Rafale, van Gogh, Miró, Renoir or any known artist.

Here, artists chosen among the best students in the fine arts schools of China produce about 5 million canvases a year, 70% of all those sold on the planet.

So thriving industry has generated complaints from numerous creators. so the Chinese Government has recently barred galleries from selling copies of live artists and works by painters who died less than 70 years ago.

In this large factory each painter makes about 30 copies a day, with systems of production in chain, where each artist specializes in a part of a concrete painting.

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