{"id":34037,"date":"2025-07-30T09:58:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T09:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/34037\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T09:58:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T09:58:09","slug":"is-a-second-mona-lisa-still-special-what-about-the-thousandth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/34037\/","title":{"rendered":"Is a second \u2018Mona Lisa\u2019 still special? What about the thousandth?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Winnie Wong<\/a> first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she\u2019d imagined.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then a graduate student in art history at MIT, Wong had read about the Chinese village in The New York Times<\/a>. The story described the village as a kind of compound where thousands of artists painted replicas of famous artworks, like da Vinci\u2019s \u201cMona Lisa\u201d or van Gogh\u2019s \u201cStarry Night,\u201d in mass quantities. These paintings were then exported mostly to Europe and the U.S., where they\u2019d hang on the walls of hotels, restaurants and second-home condominiums.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"WinnieWinnie Wong is a professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

UC Berkeley<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had an expectation, which was that there would be this giant factory, and in this factory there would be these painters working in an assembly-line fashion,\u201d says Wong, now a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. \u201cOne person would paint the rocks, one person would paint the trees, one person would paint the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n

But after she arrived in the village, less than a quarter square mile in size, what she saw over her several years of research surprised her.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

No matter how hard she looked, she couldn\u2019t find a factory; the biggest assembly line comprised three people. The number of paintings a person could do varied wildly \u2014 some could create 25 paintings a day, while others produced one per week. Artists worked in all sorts of spaces, from small studios that sometimes doubled as living quarters to storefront workshops.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wong is quick to point out that although her research is on the replica painting industry in Dafen in particular, similar operations exist in many other places \u2014 in Italy, South Korea, Brazil, even in New Jersey, Los Angeles and other cities in the U.S.<\/p>\n

In 2013, Wong published Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade<\/a>. The book looks at the image of China that many in the West have \u2014 that it\u2019s a country where mass quantities of cheap things are made with little care \u2014 and traces those stereotypes back to their origins in Europe hundreds of years ago. It also talks about the people Wong met in Dafen and how they forever changed the way she thinks about art and authenticity and the nature of creativity.<\/p>\n

The many \u2018Mona Lisas\u2019 of Dafen<\/p>\n

During her first visit to Dafen, a rural village-turned-production-town within the industrial city of Shenzhen near Hong Kong, Wong and two other researchers spoke with a man who was painting in his shop.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some recognizable works, like the \u201cMona Lisa\u201d and \u201cLady with an Ermine\u201d by Leonardo da Vinci, and \u201cThe Coronation of Napoleon\u201d by Jacques-Louis David, hung in his store. But most were paintings Wong didn\u2019t recognize. Some were replicas of works by lesser-known artists. But there were also original paintings based on photographs of families or their pets. As long as someone ordered it, someone painted it.<\/p>\n

After the scholars interviewed the man, Wong recounts, he asked them a few questions in return.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOK, so the three of you, you\u2019ve been to a lot of places in the world, right?\u2019\u201d he asked them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, kind of,\u201d they replied.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOK. Well, what do you think of our village?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very nice,\u201d they said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And he said, \u201cWell, we think it\u2019s very nice here. And we think, for example, that it\u2019s nicer than Paris, and we think our Mona Lisas are better. What do you think?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AWong spent six years in Dafen Oil Painting Village, researching its artists and its relationship to the global art market. <\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Joaquin Figueroa<\/p>\n

His question shocked Wong. As an art history student, she hadn\u2019t considered that the \u201cMona Lisa\u201d could exist in the plural, or that one could be better or worse than another \u2014 nor that how well a \u201cMona Lisa\u201d was painted could determine how nice a place was or not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very, very surprising,\u201d she admits. \u201cIt really changed my mind.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wong went on to spend six years in Dafen, researching its artists and its relationship to the global art market. She spent two of those years working as an apprentice artist in a van Gogh studio to better understand the training these artists received. And she interviewed about 200 painters of the estimated 6,000 artists that the government reported worked in the industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wong says the vast majority of painters working in Dafen are considered illicit migrants who come from other, often rural, provinces within China without official registration for urban residency. The painters she met came from a wide range of educational and art backgrounds \u2014 some had grown up with intermittent schooling and no exposure to art training at all, while others had a lot of experience, with years of university-level arts education.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the way they thought about copying another person\u2019s art varied widely, too, and often complicated the binary way Westerners tend to think about reproducing a work of art.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"anAt its height in the early 2000s, thousands of artists in Dafen produced replicas of artwork in mass quantities. These paintings were then exported mostly to Europe and the U.S., where they hung in hotels, restaurants and second-home condominiums. <\/p>\n

Courtesy of Winnie Wong<\/p>\n

Wong says that in the West, we often think of copying another person\u2019s work in two distinct ways: Either it\u2019s all bad \u2014 a creator\u2019s work is their own and should never be copied \u2014 or it\u2019s all good, in the vein that all copying is transformative, it\u2019s how we learn, and imitation is a form of flattery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But during her time in Dafen, Wong came to realize that there are many other ways of thinking about art replication that occupy a middle ground between good and bad.<\/p>\n

Some Dafen painters had what we could call a post-modernist view of the commercialization of art. One painter, who had a background in farming and became a close friend of Wong\u2019s, would say his work was \u201cfree marketing\u201d for the original artists and that they were \u201cdoing what Andy Warhol does.\u201d Others came to Dafen to realize their dream of becoming artists, and some were doing it simply because it made money and they didn\u2019t mind painting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFor some of them, it was art,\u201d says Wong. \u201cFor some of them, it was not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since her time in Dafen, Wong has interviewed world-famous artists at the opposite ends of the spectrum and found that they had a lot of similarities with the artists in the oil painting village.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is much greater similarity between the most successful artists and the most accused forger than we can imagine,\u201d she says, \u201cparticularly in the way they think about and relate to the question of: What is art?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a question that Wong and her students explore together at Berkeley.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fakes, replicas, forgeries \u2014 what counts as art?\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the past decade, Wong has taught a course at Berkeley on imitations, appropriations and replicas. In the class, students learn about 12 big forgers throughout history. One is artist Zhang Daqian, who is thought by some to have forged the painting \u201cRiverbank\u201d in the 1950s. While most believe the painting, which is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, was made by the 10th-century master Dong Yuan, skeptics say it\u2019s inconsistent stylistically with his other work and therefore can\u2019t be the original. <\/p>\n

Wong also asks her students to find a scandal to research. Students dive into all sorts of cases in areas like fashion, music, design and social media. There\u2019s one case that still puzzles Wong where an Instagram user copied an influencer\u2019s life. She posed in the same luxury locations with the same products and even had a look-alike boyfriend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is much greater similarity between the most successful artists and the most accused forger than we can imagine.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis phenomenon of not only reproducing the work of an artist, but a person \u2026 that was an interesting scandal,\u201d says Wong. \u201cI\u2019m just constantly learning from my students that there is just no shortage of very opposing views about the phenomenon that we generally call \u2018copying\u2019 that take on really complex dimensions.\u201d<\/p>\n

As artificial intelligence makes dramatic advances, allowing users to harvest other people\u2019s art, words and ideas for their own purposes, Wong says her research on fakes and forgeries has reemerged in conversations about what counts as legitimate art.<\/p>\n

Americans tend to devalue a product when it\u2019s easily available, she says, like it is with AI or replicas of a famous painting. We find a piece of art beautiful or a poem well-written if it\u2019s one-of-a-kind and hard to come by. When it\u2019s easy to recreate, it disturbs our sense of making and what it means to be creative human beings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She likens the anxieties that Americans felt about globalization and moving manufacturing to China in the \u201890s and early 2000s to our current misgivings about AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the history of forgery, this is a constant kind of aesthetic question, a philosophical question,\u201d says Wong. \u201cAfter you find out something is a forgery, you cannot change it. You somehow cannot undo it in your mind and experience the painting like you did before. In some philosophical thinking, that can seem hypocritical.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a decade since Wong was last in Dafen. In 2015, as part of an interdisciplinary research studio<\/a> at Berkeley, Wong and architecture and urban design professor Margaret Crawford<\/a> took a group of graduate students to study urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta region. They spent a day in Dafen, where they visited the van Gogh shop where Wong worked as an apprentice years earlier.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"aDuring the students\u2019 fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta region, art practice student Jos\u00e9 Joaquin Figueroa documented the scope of the project through a series of watercolor paintings. In this illustration, Wong sits with the van Gogh painter she apprenticed for in his shop in Dafen. <\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Joaquin Figueroa<\/a><\/p>\n

When the group returned to the U.S., students and faculty spent the summer transforming their research materials into a multimedia exhibition<\/a> of paintings, models, dioramas and video. It was showcased on the Berkeley campus and in Shanghai.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the years after the 2008 financial crisis in the West, international orders for replica paintings from Dafen dropped, and demand began to shift more toward the domestic market, which grew unabated as the Chinese property market continued to soar until very recently.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I saw it in 2015, it was still very active, but it was different,\u201d Wong remembers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the recent downturn in the property market, Wong suspects that Dafen and its artists are experiencing hard times. She knows the painters are still working, but they face an uncertain future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After you find out something is a forgery, you cannot \u2026 undo it in your mind and experience the painting like you did before. In some philosophical thinking, that can seem hypocritical.<\/p>\n

Currently, the mutual hostility between the U.S. and China, as well as censorship by the Chinese government, make the kind of research Wong and her students were able to do just a decade ago nearly impossible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wong recalls a time when she was working as an apprentice where she saw firsthand why it\u2019s so important that we pay attention to other ways of thinking about art and authenticity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

One day, a group of English-speaking teachers came into the shop, looking for decorations for their new apartment. When they saw \u201cThe Starry Night,\u201d they couldn\u2019t remember why they recognized the image. When Wong told them that it was a replica of the famous painting, they left without buying it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the same day, a group of construction workers speaking Mandarin were struck by \u201cWheatfield with Crows,\u201d one of van Gogh\u2019s last paintings before he died by suicide.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese three construction men, dressed in their construction clothing, came in and said, \u2018van Gogh\u2019s last masterpiece: its psychological power.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

They knew that what they were viewing was a copy of the original painting, but that knowledge didn\u2019t prevent them from having a conversation about van Gogh and the painting in front of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAt any other given moment, either one of these paintings could have been thought of as a forgery or as an imitation or as an appropriation or as a replica or as any number of things,\u201d says Wong.<\/p>\n

But perhaps that\u2019s not the point, she continues. Maybe bearing witness to these moments, when thoughts about art are made in real time, is actually much more interesting than adhering to certain static ideas about what art is \u2014 or isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she\u2019d imagined.\u00a0 Then…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34038,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-34037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}