Figure 15.1 Shanzhai Paul Smith bags in Shenzhen (photo by Jeroen de Kloet)
Jeroen de Kloet and Yiu Fai Chow
China is generally perceived as the manufacturer of the world. Whereas “created in China” has become one prime focus of national cultural policy (Keane 2013), the label “Made in China” continues to proliferate in global stories about abuses of labor in the production of iPhones and the massive production of steel and coal. Dovetailing with this narrative of China as the world’s factory is the image of China as a nation of copiers. After China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the nation aspired to a more stringent implementation of its copyright laws—performed at times by the public burning of pirated DVDs. However, from the production of imitation smartphones and designer clothes, to the building of look-a-like architecture, and the faking of events, copying practices still persist. While “fake” remains the prevailing term in English, particularly in the legal language of intellectual property, in China the popular qualifier is shanzhai. There are shanzhai iPhones, shanzhai Paul Smiths, shanzhai White Houses, shanzhai movie stars, and shanzhai CCTV Spring Festival Galas (Zhang and Fung 2013).
In this chapter we examine the proliferation of the vernacular term and its potential usefulness in rethinking notions of the “original,” the “authentic,” the “pirated,” and the “fake,” notions that are mapped onto a discourse of authorship that constitutes the basic underpinning of the global copyright regime. After presenting the circulation of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and its articulations in China, we move on to one particular case—Dafen art village in Shenzhen—to understand how shanzhai operates in practice, especially in its implicit interrogation of the IPR discourse. In doing so, we argue for more research on three aspects of shanzhai culture: the aesthetics of the artworks or objects being produced; their local, national, and global circulation; and the aspirations of the people who are making shanzhai art. In this chapter, this third dimension will be our primary entry point, which allows us also to reflect on the other two dimensions. Informed by two rounds of fieldwork in Dafen, we believe that these three dimensions, pertaining to aesthetics, circulation, and aspirations, help complicate our understanding of the production of the fake and the copy. Nevertheless, our study also shows how resilient the discourse of originality is, and how the notion of shanzhai is less productive in explaining what is actually occurring in Dafen. We conclude by reiterating the empirical importance of the three dimensions, less for recalibrating the global IPR regime, but instead to challenge and complicate the stereotype of China as a “copy nation” abusing a massive labor force of migrant workers.
The global copyright regime can be traced back to a romantic-capitalist ideology rooted in a belief in individual creativity and ownership (Frith 1993). With the emergence of the cultural (or creative—see Kong 2014 for the distinction) industries, copyright laws protect not only the rights of individual artists but also, and more so, entities with capital investments in these rights, like Disney and EMI. Tellingly, the United States has moved from a copyright violator to the strongest defender of IPR within merely one century. As Debora Halbert remarks, the language underpinning IPR adds a strong moral tone to the legal framework. “Making foreign piracy a moral issue instead of a legal one is an important step in distinguishing the good from the bad. … The story creates the identities of victim, villain, and hero in order to justify intervention” (Halbert 1997, 69–70). Such a narrative with victims and villains (Asian pirates abusing American creativity and technological knowledge) conceals the larger political economy—that of the culture industry rather than that of the individual creator—and justifies the imposition of U.S. notions of copyright on developing countries (1997, 72). It is, however, not only the United States, but also, for example, the culture industries in Hong Kong and Japan that demand adherence to the IPR regime.
Interestingly, in the mid-1980s, there were virtually no counterfeit goods on the Chinese market; pirated copies appeared there only after the liberalization of the country’s economy and the introduction of improved manufacturing facilities (Clark 2000, 22). China became known as a copy nation due to its integration with the global capitalist economy. The entry of China into the WTO in 2001 marked a global recognition of China’s increasingly important role in the world economy—a promotion that came with concomitant responsibilities, hence China’s aspiration to comply more closely with the global IPR regime. On the one hand, this compliance has been met with critical, anti-neoliberal voices questioning the real value of this acquiescence to the industries or individual creators. On the other hand, to uncritically validate or celebrate its inverse, that is, a culture of copying without copyright protection, runs the danger of overtly romanticizing the labor involved in copying. Furthermore, as Laikwan Pang observes, “one of the most heart-breaking examples took place in 2004, when knock-off baby formulas caused the deaths of 12 babies and serious malnutrition in more than 220 others” (2008, 132). The culture of copying, in particular when it concerns food, cars, and other potentially hazardous products, can have fatal implications.
There is a certain irony in China’s subscription to the IPR regime. Whereas new approaches towards copyright are being explored in the West (e.g. Creative Commons), “China appears to have forsaken ideals of sharing and collaborative creativity for a much more individualized and commercialized notion of intellectual property rights” (Montgomery and Fitzgerald 2006, 408). Even putting aside the fundamental ethics concerning IPR, what remains problematic in China is the inconsistent manner in which IPR is implemented. Lucy Montgomery and Brian Fitzgerald show how creative industries in China try to work around the lack of IPR enforcement by looking for new models of making money, for example through product placement and innovative uses of Internet technologies. In the music industry, for instance, artists earn so little from their recordings that CDs have practically become promotional products used to publicize live concerts and promote celebrity.
Beyond this “official” intention to comply with the IPR regime, some in the West and in China itself advance what they consider to be the traditional and typical Chinese indifference toward novelty and a corresponding emphasis on continuity, copying, repetition, and rote learning to configure a cultural context for the prevalence and general acceptance of the fake. While one could as easily mobilize other scholarship on Chinese culture to counter such essentialist claims (Wang Hui in Pang 2012,15), any discussions along this line inevitably evoke discussions and paradigms of authenticity, originality, and ownership, imbricating to aesthetic, legal, and moral judgments that ultimately dismiss the fake as aesthetically insignificant, legally infringing, and morally wrong. In their article, Montgomery and Fitzgerald revert to Confucius, who is alleged to support the idea of transmission rather than creation, and argue for its new relevance in today’s China (2006). While we wonder whether such claims to indigenous history resonate with contemporary realities in China, they help open up ways to rethink the current IPR regime.
Pang observes that “the West fears China’s copying power, while China is concerned that it can only copy. Copying is feared because it is both powerful and powerless, depending on where one sits and what is at stake” (2008, 123). She also shows how the discourse of creativity has a different tradition in China, driven by a “rationale of protecting and promulgating culture through mimesis [which] is found in almost all dimensions of traditional Chinese pedagogy, in that reciting and copying classics and rituals is the backbone of humanities education” (2008, 123). As Pang stresses, the point is not to invoke an essentialist notion of Chinese creativity, but to point at the relative newness of the discourse of copyright in the context of China, a newness that, we contend, makes the discourse more unstable and more susceptible to changes and slippages of meaning.
Some scholars situate discussions of the fake within the parameters of the global political economy, specifically with regard to inequality. As China is framed as collectively and nationally stealing creative products from other countries and reproducing them at low cost to flood the market (Pang 2012; Wong 2014), such practices can be understood as embedded in our times, or in Ackbar Abbas’ formulation, “as a social, cultural and economic response, at a local and appa rently trivial level, to the process of globalization and to the uneven and often unequal relations that globalization has engendered” (Abbas 2008, 251). Richard Rosecrance points to the division of the world into what he calls the “head” and “body” nations (1999). While the head nations are responsible for the creative side of things, the body nations offer the manual labor. When people in the body nations are only allowed to produce but not to consume the products, fake products start to emerge to respond to this global inequity.
Similarly, Abbas argues that what makes the fake desirable and possible is the historical conjuncture where people who cannot afford the real, demand the real, and thereby engender the supply of something that looks exactly like the real. In other words, the production of the fake is intricately connected to processes of globalization, of information, of lifestyle, and of economic inequalities not only between the global North and South but also within the South itself. However, while fake products may be seen as cheap entrance tickets for poorer consumers to feel included in a certain lifestyle and identity, Abbas rejects their subversive potential. Rather, he sees fakes as confirming, or being symptomatic of, the global order itself. After all, the “body” nations are still working on the products, real or fake, conceived, designed, and therefore squarely originated in the “head” nations. A fundamental redress to this persistent global inequality, Abbas thus concludes, is the promotion and proliferation of design education and culture in China (Abbas 2008). In his reading, however, the paradigms of authenticity, originality, and ownership in the end remain in place. While the fake may be understood differently, as a response to, as a subversion of, or as a confirmation of global inequality, they remain fake, vis-à-vis an unperturbed underpinning of what is considered real.
The emergence of the discourse of shanzhai culture is illustrative of the instability of the IPR discourse in China. While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it began to circulate, the term was noted around the turn of the millennium. It has since become so popular that in 2008 the state-sponsored CCTV ran a documentary on shanzhai mobile phones, generating nationwide publicity for what it dubbed “shanzhai culture.” The same year shanzhai was the most searched word in China, according to a survey by Google. In 2012, when the sixth edition of the authoritative Modern Chinese Dictionary was published, shanzhai was one of the new entries (Wang 2009).
In fact, a number of studies, taking cues from the circulation of terms in other locations that, like shanzhai, are not translatable to the real–fake binary, have questioned the universal application of authenticity, originality, and ownership discourses (see Hendry 2000 on Japanese theme parks). Writing on Vietnamese consumer markets, Elizabeth Vann notes “The idea of authenticity as ‘original expression’ is a specifically Euro-American concern” and “is not always a useful tool” (Vann 2006, 288). We choose to follow the vernacular term “shanzhai” to avoid the foreclosure configured by paradigms of authenticity, originality, and ownership.
Originally a Cantonese term, shanzhai was used in various Chinese classical texts, to denote “fortified mountain village,” “mountain fortress,” or “a bandit stronghold in the mountain” (Wang 2009). In particular, the Chinese literary classic Water Margins, which depicts a group of outlaws and their heroic stories, provided the term with its dominant imagery: grassroots rebellion and anti-establishment romanticism (Zhang and Fung 2013). One can also trace the notion back to Lu Xun’s idea of “grabism.” As Andrew Chubb remarks, “With shanzhai culture Chinese producers and consumers have taken the tradition of Grabism—active and intense engagement and exchange with economic and cultural authority—to new heights of popularity and scale” (2015, 279). Its more recent emergence can be traced to the industrializing Hong Kong of the 1970s where small-scale factories and family-run workshops were organized to manufacture cheap and low-quality products for overseas orders (Bao 2011). From here it would not be difficult to imagine the term’s appropriation in Chinese localities like Shenzhen as a preferred term for factories producing mimic smartphones and so forth. As such, shanzhai culture can be conceived as something grassroots and rebellious, or, in the words of technology blogger John Biggs, “a strange amalgam of counterfeiting, national pride, and Robin Hoodism” (Josephine Ho in Zhang and Fung 2013, 404). On the other hand, as Lin Zhang and Anthony Fung remind us, commercialization remains the key driving force behind shanzhai culture, and Chen Zhi also points to its historical tendency to follow the power structure of mainstream society despite it being outside the mainstream (2011). Chubb remarks, “On closer inspection, [shanzhai’s] resistance appears either superficial, or paralleled by contradictory impulses of affirmation of the same authority it purportedly subverts” (2015, 276).
This indeterminacy of shanzhai culture is precisely what invites us to attempt the move from fake to shanzhai. If we are not sure what shanzhai culture is doing, we need to find out. Instead of privileging analyses of products amidst theorizations of the fake, an inquiry into shanzhai should, to follow the spatial imagery thus evoked, enter the stronghold and find out what the people in shanzhai are doing. In that sense, our inquiry into Dafen Village and its place as part of shanzhai culture is a supplement to existing enquiries into both Dafen and shanzhai culture. On the one hand, existing shanzhai studies tend to examine its economic ramifications and cultural influences (Bao 2011). There are exceptions, but none puts shanzhai practitioners and practices at the center of their explorations. Bao Yueping’s inquiry assumes a sociological perspective to analyze shanzhai as a phenomenon (2011). Zhang and Fung use what they call “the myth of shanzhai culture” to unravel the complex narratives of digital democracy as seen in a shanzhai CCTV show (2013). Jeroen de Kloet and Lena Scheen question the concepts of the generic city and the global city by positing Pudong as the shanzhai global city (2013; see Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1 Shanzhai Paul Smith bags in Shenzhen (photo by Jeroen de Kloet)
We are aware of the danger of celebrating shanzhai. Winnie Won Yin Wong argues that in this emerging discourse around shanzhai, “the Chinese copyist has been newly repositioned as a guerilla counterfeiter (shanzhai)—the ultra-skilled manual worker who contests Western power through brazen appropriation” (2014, 87). As she rightly points out, this discourse continues to depend on the notion of copying as “catch-up”—an idea that also underpins Abbas’ conception of the fake discussed earlier, resulting in a teleological narrative in which “economic and political prowess produces creativity, and that a nation, like an artist, learns to copy only in its earliest days of ‘training’” (2014, 87). We want to steer away from such a reading of shanzhai, and argue that the proposed prism of aesthetics, circulation, and especially, the people behind the production, offer useful tools to do so.
Lin Yi-Chieh mentions Dafen briefly in her introduction to a monograph primarily concerned with counterfeit culture and economy in China. Framed in the discourse of “fake,” Dafen is where “painters, artisan-painters and apprentices are working to produce commissioned paintings of Western masterpieces” (2011, 2). In other words, they produce “fake stuff,” the main title of Lin’s work. In a book-length interrogation of the creative economy and the requisite concepts and practices of IPR, Pang includes a discussion of Dafen in her concluding chapter. Like us, Pang situates Dafen in shanzhai culture, but the key question she poses is about possible alternatives to the dominant global development logic, and the route she takes is guided by the “appropriation” artworks created by two well-known artists, not shanzhai practitioners and practices (Pang 2012).
Wong’s study is based on substantial ethnographic, art historical, and archival research, making it by far the most comprehensive investigation of Dafen (2014). After locating Dafen in the Chinese tradition of “export paintings” and “trade paintings,” Wong examines and punctures the discourses of originality, authenticity, and creativity that continue to frame prevailing ways of understanding Dafen. Her inquiry follows “the process by which Dafen production comes to represent ‘China,’ ‘the copy,’ and the alienating effects of ‘the market’” (Wong 2014, 22–23). Wong, for example, demystifies the idea of factory labor by showing how most galleries consist of one or two persons. She explores the craftsmanship and artistic ideals of the painters, and shows how the policy measures of the local and national governments have a limited impact on the daily realities of Dafen. She also shows how in many artworks and events related to Dafen the painters and their works are used as props and are thereby denied their individuality. For example, an exhibition involving Dafen practitioners at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 continuously framed them as “migrant workers.”
Our current inquiry builds on this body of research. In contradistinction to Wong, we hope to further a more productive line of discourse around the notion of shanzhai. Choosing to see Dafen as part and parcel of shanzhai culture, this inquiry departs from the dominant framing of the practices in Dafen in terms of copying, counterfeit, or mimicry. It also redirects the trajectory from the product towards the people and what exactly they are doing. While we are aware of issues of inequities, the position taken up by Pang strikes us as too simplistic, if not paternalistic, when she writes, “the industrial operation of Dafen Village is a typical form of class exploitation, and there is nothing romantic about the mass reproduction of trade painting” (2014, 229). Wong’s analysis shows convincingly that this portrayal is one-sided and highly problematic, as “the vast majority of Dafen painters work independently in their own homes and studios, produce paintings that are made to order, paid for by the piece, for patrons whose commissions and prices they are free to accept or reject” (Wong 2014, 15).
When we take shanzhai as a heuristic device, we see more indeterminacy and more complexity than the commonly presented narratives of exploitation or mass reproduction (or faking, copying, and counterfeiting). We hesitate to see the people working in Dafen as victims by default; nor do we want to give precedence to the artists working on or with them—we want to focus solely on the painter–workers and their practices. During the summers of 2012 and 2013, we spent more than a week in Dafen. Indeed, we found fake Van Goghs and fake Mona Lisas virtually everywhere, but we also found much more by talking with people working in Dafen’s alleys, shops, and galleries.
Occupying four square kilometers in an area called Buji, Dafen has long been a small inconspicuous village, one left behind by the rapid economic and urban development in Shenzhen. The metamorphosis of Dafen from a small village to “the centre of a big industry, with about 8,000 artists responsible for creating 60 percent of the world’s oil paintings” is generally accredited to a person by the name of Huang Jiang (Al Jazeera 2010). Trained as a painter in Guangzhou, Huang immigrated to Hong Kong in 1970, where he worked and continued his art education at the same time. After an initial career as a solo artist, Huang became involved in the business of trade paintings. Finding it difficult to expand his business because of the high rents in Hong Kong, in the summer of 1989 he decided to set up a new workplace on a piece of farmland just outside the city proper of Shenzhen.
When Huang first moved to Dafen, he took some thirty apprentices with him. Responding to large orders and the demand for efficiency as well as standardization, Huang favored using a strict division of labor, assigning apprentices to handle specific parts of a painting. This “production-line model” (Art Radar 2012) proved to be a huge success and its associated, and often highly mediatized, images of mass production, anonymous workers, and uniform copies became the dominant representation of how Dafen works. Subsequently, Huang’s apprentices set up their own businesses while others were lured to Dafen by Huang’s commercial success and helped give shape to Dafen Village, as we know it (Yang 2004; Wong 2014; Harney 2005; see Figure 15.2).
Figure 15.2 Transporting Van Gogh in Dafen (photo by Jeroen de Kloet)
According to a Shenzhen Academy of Social Sciences report published in 2004, more than 700 individual artist studios and 280 galleries were operating in Dafen, with more than 2,000 people working in the area and more than 6 million paintings sold per year (Yang 2004). Of all the trade paintings circulated in the United States, 70 percent came from China, among which 80 percent originated from Shenzhen (Yang 2004). Between 2004 and 2010, the number of Dafen painters officially counted and registered ranged from 5,000 to 8,000, and they produced 3–5 million paintings per year in hundreds of small studios and workshops (Wong 2014). The trade volume of its oil painting industry is estimated to have reached 80 million yuan in 2003, skyrocketing to 430 million yuan towards the end of the decade to account for one-third of the global commodity oil painting market (Art Radar 2012).
This “success story” was so extraordinary that it became exemplary. When Shenzhen’s municipal government drafted plans for its participation in the Shanghai World Expo, Dafen was put forward to epitomize and valorize how creative industries and urban renewal practices collaborated to yield economic and cultural benefits. This was but one of the more recent examples of official involvement in the construction and promotion of Dafen as an art production center. As early as 2001, Buji’s administration perceived the potential of Dafen and redesignated it a “‘cultural village’ performing the functions of oil painting trading, leisure and tourism, as well as training” (Yang 2004, 67). In the midst of projects to ameliorate local housing and infrastructure challenges, Buji officials started organizing tours in 2002 to open up foreign markets. Since 2004, an annual International Cultural Industry Fair has been organized in Dafen, with one of its aims being to foreground original works of the local artists. In 2007, an investment of one hundred million yuan saw the realization of the 17,000-square-meter Dafen Art Museum in the center of the village. Such attempts to shift from “copy to creative Shenzhen” (Art Radar 2012) are in turn interwoven with the national longings to shift from “Made in China” to “Created in China” (Keane 2013). If the celebrated catchphrase gaige kaifang (reform and opening up) and its concomitant policy paradigm dictated the national economic trends in the 1980s and 1990s, the new millennium saw an updated version of the motto: gaige chuangxin (reform and innovation), which was put forward by former president Hu Jintao (Pang 2012, 8). While the new policies, whether in Shenzhen or in Beijing, are scripted in the form of promises offered by the so-called “creative economy,” fundamentally, they testify to the discursive power of authenticity and originality, as well as the legal authority and economic realities of intellectual ownership. As far as Dafen is concerned, every attempt to demonstrate that it is more than a base of fake painting production, in fact, reiterates the dominant perception that it is nothing more than that.
In debates about shanzhai products, as we observed earlier, much attention is given to their status as “copies.” With the exception of Wong’s study (2014), close readings of the aesthetics and craftsmanship of these artworks are rare. More common are readings of artworks as they relate to Dafen itself (Pang 2012). Wong (2014) intertwines her ethnography of Dafen with analyses of artworks that engage with Dafen. Wong shows how the painter–workers are being asked not to remain too close to the original on which they draw, but instead to develop their own style. This attests to the creativity involved in the making of shanzhai art.
In the following, we would first like to make a plea for taking this creativity and the aesthetics of the works themselves more seriously. In our conversations with the Dafen painters for example, they described several approaches they employed to create their works: using images from the Internet, reworking existing masterpieces, or playing with homophonic puns of Chinese words for “auspicious” effects. Second, the distribution of these artworks warrants further study: who buys them, for what price, who are the intermediaries, and how do they end up in a hotel room in Detroit or in the shop of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam? Whereas a study of the aesthetics of an artwork recuperates the creativity of the makers, the study of its circulation, and thus its underlying political economy, helps steer the analysis away from generalizing rubrics like “global capitalism,” which continue to frame the painter–workers as migrant workers and victims. Third, we turn our attention to the people creating the paintings. What became clear to us after just a few days of exploring Dafen, was the sheer diversity of stories there. Not only do the professional roles of the people working and living there differ, but the variety of motivations and aspirations of the gallery owners, framers, and painter–workers in Dafen counter the global image of an anonymous labor force.
Dong Ran1 is a twenty-seven-year-old painter from Guangdong who came to Dafen seven years ago. When talking about creativity, he articulated, as did most other painters we spoke with, the discourse that privileges the original over the copy. In his words, original works “are embedded in thinking, one’s own thinking. Hanghua are simply imitations.” Hanghua is the word used for the commercial paintings produced in Dafen. However, during the same interview he also muddled that clear distinction claiming, “Our works are actually very close to artworks. We are just a thin layer away from real art.” Other painters are also critical of the “real” art world, for example Wei Wei from Guangxi, who was in his twenties. In his view, an exhibition was actually a kind of “packaging,” and people in 798—the well-known art district in Beijing (also known as Dashanzi) —“are only chasing after money and fame. It’s rather superficial.”
Wei Wei’s colleague Liu Heping, aged twenty-three, moved to Dafen four months after finishing his studies at an academy of fine arts. Liu held to the dominant discourse, claiming Dafen “to be closer to the market. You paint according to what the market demands. It’s different from the academy.” This narrative, drenched in the global discourse on what counts as creative, is dominant, even when the painters know they cannot live up to this ideal. Wang Xinping, a twenty-seven-year-old women from Hubei who moved to Dafen after working in a factory for three years, claimed that “originality is very important … [but] it is too hard to insist on doing original work. The pressure of living is too heavy.”
The global discourse on “real art” thus produces in Dafen a sense of lack and lagging behind, as we will elaborate when we further discuss the aspirations of these painter–workers. The resilience and hegemony of ideas related to originality and individuality bring into question the earlier discussed notion that in China creativity means something quite different, and that mimetic practices are considered more acceptable. The Dafen experience also compels us to ponder how productive the rubric of shanzhai ultimately is. It seems that the global discourse of creativity, and its moral complicity with the global IPR regime, remains firmly in place.
Underwriting Wong’s findings (2014), we want to highlight the diversity we encountered in Dafen. While visiting the galleries, we experienced an approach to art that we had not faced anywhere else. The galleries we are more familiar with in the West usually have guards, and physical barriers—symbolic or not—in order to sustain the sanctified aura of “real art.” By not showing the prices of the artworks, and by often having to ring a bell in order to even enter the space, Western galleries further distance the viewer from the work. Dafen galleries struck us as much more inviting. Their doors were usually open and the price tags clearly visible. The owner of one gallery, after inquiring about which style we liked and how many rooms our house had, told us, “Why don’t you go and have a coffee. I’ll select a package of works, one for each room, as I have an idea of your taste. We can offer you a good price.” Such package deals, the literal domestication of art for use as an interior item, and the claim to knowledge of the client’s taste, all undermine dominant notions in the established art world.
The emphasis on valuing the client’s personal taste was further affirmed when we bought a work from an artist in Dafen. (We should add that we ourselves were victim to the standard global artistic discourse as we selected a “unique” work rather than a reproduction of a known work.) Upon having the piece delivered to Hong Kong, the gallery owner followed up to ensure it had arrived safely and to offer a post-sale warranty, saying that if the work turned out to be at odds with our decor, it could always be replaced. Such an approach, in which the aesthetic value of an artwork is directly and functionally connected to its physical context, is unthinkable in the Western art world—where it is the artwork, and only the artwork, that is relevant. The circulation of Dafen artwork thus comes with a different set of values that steer away from the pure sacralization of the work, and towards, in our examples, the physical context and the client’s taste. According to Liu Heping, “the market welcomes works that appeal to both elite and popular tastes, mainly landscapes and flowers, more colorful … The people like to see some meanings in the work” (see Figure 15.3).
Many painter–workers also work on order for individual clients. Zhou Guohua, who came to Dafen in 1996 from Xiamen, where he graduated from art school explained:
I work mainly on order. The clients will give me some instruction, or models, or photographs, and then I will make it according to my own demands. Finally, the client will inspect the works. … Such works are not really works—they are only copies. I usually spend more than ten days to complete one.
Here we detect the discourse of “original art” again. In addition, Zhou belongs to the more “elite” group of painter–workers in Dafen who can afford to spend so much time on one work. His statement also points to one common practice in Dafen where clients are given the opportunity to change the contents of a famous work, for example, by substituting the face of the subject
Figure 15.3 Gallery in Dafen (photo by Jeroen de Kloet)
in the Mona Lisa with that of the client’s daughter (de Kloet and Scheen 2013), or to change the colors of a van Gogh painting to better match a sofa. Such alterations again pose a challenge to the dominant discourse, in which the uniqueness of a work demands it remain forever the same.
Dong Ran’s validation of “real art” reoccurred when he described his future aspirations. He claimed his motivation for working in Dafen was “to improve my skills, ultimately to do some original works.” And again he said, “If I had a rich father, I would simply do original works. One painting a month, and then stage an exhibition once in a while, and put high price tags on my works.” These words trouble the image of the painter–worker as a factory worker. Yet at the same time, the dominant discourse on what constitutes “real art” remains unchallenged. This aspiration came up again and again in our talks with the painters. Some belittle themselves; Wei Wei, for example, said that “We in Dafen have our own little passion, paint a little something, earn a little, and we can live on. Simple people leading simple lives.” More often, such modesty morphed into more candid articulations of aspirations, as in the case of Liu Heping, who told us he wanted to paint his own paintings and start his own business. He explained, “You have to do imitation paintings in order to be able to do original works. … You need to live. You would die if you only do original works. … My dream is to leave this [trade painting] world in the future. I hope to be able to earn my living and continue doing creative works, good works, and then try to have my own exhibition at some point, and really enter the art world.”
Figure 15.4 A painter at work (photo by Jeroen de Kloet)
In our conversations with Dafen painter–workers, Beijing’s 798 Art District often surfaced as an impossible ideal. In Wang Xingping’s words, “I have never thought of going to 798. I heard that only top talents go there … However hard we try here, I don’t think we can ever get ourselves to Beijing.” But many did have the ideal of at least having their own gallery where they could sell their own work. Zhou Guohua explained how his plan was “to make better paintings, save a little money and then do what I like to do. For instance open a gallery and sell the paintings I like.” Wang Li, a twenty-three-year-old fashion design graduate from Chengdu, claimed no plans: “I guess I just keep on working, as I’m doing now, take some orders, and then draw a plan later. My dream is just to paint” (see Figure 15.4).
In this chapter we have argued for the use of the notion of shanzhai to avoid getting trapped in an original–fake binary, which, as it is deeply entrenched in the global IPR regime, requires rethinking. We have proposed to further research shanzhai along three different dimensions: aesthetics, circulation, and aspirations. Our Dafen experience confronts us with the empirical limits of our conceptual move towards shanzhai. It is a term the painter–workers do not really use. We think it is important to emphasize this, and read it as a reminder for academic modesty (Kuipers 2013) and the value of empirical research. How useful is shanzhai as a concept to analyze paintings and painter–workers in Dafen when—despite its particular popularity in online vernacular discourse—the painter–workers do not employ the term themselves? Furthermore, our interviews reveal the resilience and hegemony of a globalized artistic discourse that thrives on individuality, talent, and originality; and to which reproduction, faking, and commercialism function as its constitutive outsides. Again, this runs counter to our wish to debunk these moral justifications of an IPR regime, unless we ascribe the articulations of these painter–workers to “false consciousness,” which we do not want to do.
We see this disjuncture between theory, academic debates, and the actual practices we witnessed in Dafen as an important reminder for those conducting empirical research. While the notion of shanzhai may be of help to conceptually rethink the IPR regime, much more needs to be done to truly unsettle this discourse. On the other hand, we believe the empirical routes proposed here—aesthetics, circulation, and aspirations—problematize the easy generalizations that continue to be made about China as a copying and counterfeiting nation. As our brief study has shown, these routes may not lead to an outright alternative to the global IPR regime, but they help undermine persisting stereotypes, especially regarding the life and fate of migrant work and the assumed evils of global capitalism—thereby providing a more complex representation of those living and working in Dafen Village.
Finally, we posit that an approach through the prisms of aesthetics, circulation, and aspirations may be mobilized to study other forms of copying. Conceptually, the terminology used— “faking” or “shanzhai”—is less of a concern; what matters is that the sheer diversity we witnessed in Dafen is likely to multiply when we move the analysis to different objects—a shanzhai iPhone will involve different aesthetics, modes of circulation, and aspirations when compared to the work of a shanzhai star on the Internet. We believe it is important to commit ourselves to such diversity and complexity. This, we are aware, may well be an expected outcome of academic work: things are more complicated than they seem. Nevertheless, when it comes to the global circulation of pervasive ideas about China as a global factory with hordes of anonymous migrant workers or the perception of China as a copying nation devoid of “true” creativity, such a commitment remains urgent.
1 Names are anonymized.
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