Difficulties faced by Dafen Village

"The First Village of Oil Painting" in China: Facing the problem of transformation and persistence.

When the clock goes to 12, Dafen Village in Longgang District, Shenzhen begins to get busy. Yang Yi, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and a painter who became a monk halfway, walked into a narrow alley with a drawing board and various pigments on his back, and continued to color the unfinished oil paintings. Xiao Zhong, who doesn't want to move, said that Dafen Village has done a good job in taking orders and selling, with stable old customers, concentrated talents and mature industries.

Every year before and after the Spring Festival, it is the peak period for galleries to take orders, and it is also the busiest time for Yang Yi. During this time, Yang Yi worked day and night almost every day. Painters can earn 30 thousand to 40 thousand a month, 10 thousand to 20 thousand is common, and the worst level can earn 30 thousand to 40 thousand

From time to time, the silence during coloring was broken by the phone number of the gallery and the bargaining voice of the painters. Behind this calm, which is called "the first village of oil painting in China", are all kinds of bad voices.

In Dafen Village, painters and galleries gather together, and the relevant industrial chain and trade scale have been formed. However, due to such factors as too few original works, too many replicas and soaring rents, this place, which was once regarded by Shenzhen officials as a model for the development of cultural and creative industries, has been criticized, and the voice surrounding whether it will decline has never stopped.

After the completion of the oil painting industrial park in Shangyou County, Jiangxi Province, this kind of voice became more and more prominent. The website of Shangyou county government shows that the total investment of the industrial park project is 2 billion yuan. After completion, it will attract more than 3,000 oil painting artists to settle in and undertake the batch transfer of oil painting industries such as Dafen, Fujian Putian and Xiamen Haicang. 180 More than 80 painters have moved to Dafen Village.

Some old painters in Dafen Village are still unwilling to move away. In their eyes, Dafen Village faces many problems, but it is a spontaneously formed oil painting base, closest to the market, and its position is irreplaceable in the short term. Gallery owners often change.

Dafen Village covers an area of 0.4 square kilometers and has tens of thousands of painters and calligraphers. From 65438 to 0989, Hong Kong painter Huang Jiang came to Dafen, rented private houses to recruit students and painters, and created, copied, collected and resold oil paintings in batches, which opened the artistic road of Dafen Village.

Yang Yi is from Guizhou. After Chuanmei graduated, she traveled around for three years and came to Dafen Village. His painting is called "line drawing", which means copying and copying painting. From his survival mode, we can see the epitome of Dafen Village's industrial chain.

Usually, after receiving the order from the gallery, he paints as required and the gallery sells it again. Landscape, portrait and decoration are particularly common in painting themes.

However, Yang Yi is not a real painting. "After receiving the order, print this painting with a special color printer and linen. The painter doesn't need to configure, just need to fill in the color, so that the picture becomes a concave-convex surface and looks like an oil painting. " He told the reporter of China Business News.

Galleries are priced according to the size and complexity of paintings. He can fill in more than a dozen paintings with a length of 20 cm and a width every day, and the price of a painting is more than 100 yuan. "The gallery keeps at least twice the profit, and paintings with 100 yuan can generally sell for three or four hundred yuan when sold abroad."

Around the Spring Festival, Yang Yi was very busy with high income, but a good day was rare. In the off-season from June to September, a painter with a lower level can earn two or three thousand yuan a month.

The rising housing prices in Dafen Village have also been vomited by painters. The alley painted by Yang Yi is only a dozen meters long. Such alleys can be seen everywhere in Dafen Village. They are narrow and filled with all kinds of paints and painting tools. The main driver of the painter's nest here is the rise in housing prices. Yang Yi's residence is a dozen square meters of peasant houses, and the monthly rent is six or seven hundred yuan.

Even painters with independent galleries can't escape the "curse" of rent. Shopkeeper Wu Li has a small gallery near the back entrance of Dafen Village, which mainly sells streaming animation. "Three years ago, an ordinary location 15 square meter gallery cost only 1000 yuan a month, but now it has doubled to 2,000-2,500 yuan, and the slightly better location is as high as 5,000-6,000 yuan." In three years, because she couldn't persist for several times, she was used to seeing nearby galleries. As early as around 2006, there was a wave of departure in Dafen Village. Xiao Zhong, a painter, said that after the emergence of inkjet technology, the threshold was lowered and the price dropped too much, so many people couldn't stay and left.

Xiao Zhong is also a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts. "Anyone can draw, don't need a professional background, as long as you can fill in the color. Even if you can't, you can learn a color filling technique in two months. " He exclaimed.

After the threshold is lowered, the increase in the number of novices is accompanied by more intense competition. Xiao Zhong told China Business News that in the past, a figure painter could get at least three or four hundred yuan.

Graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts who have received professional training should compete with those who have no artistic foundation. Even more embarrassing, they may not be able to compete. "Some people who became monks halfway did not finish their studies, but just stared at a series, such as Van Gogh's paintings. After a few years, the color filling speed is fast, and the graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts can't compete at all, so they have to go. " Xiao Zhong said, "Many graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts are also very arrogant, otherwise they will survive in a year or two."

Oil paintings from the west have been difficult to open in the domestic market. After the global financial crisis in 2008, foreign orders fell sharply, and the survival dilemma of Dafen Village attracted attention from all walks of life, and the thinking of "Dafen Model" began to rise. Some scholars believe that Dafen Village relies too much on replication and is at the low end of the industrial chain, calling for adjustment of the development model. Original works are regarded as the way out for Dafen Village to rise again. The government also encourages transformation through policies such as the allocation of affordable housing and the integration of points into households.

Overnight, the number of people engaged in originality increased, but the market effect was not as hot as expected. Take the Louvre across the street from the main entrance of Dafen Village as an example. Since its opening six or seven years ago, this exhibition center, which aims at creating original works of art, has gathered more than 100 original painters because the rent is tens of percent cheaper than that in the village. Because the market is deserted, the number has been lost.

Mei Yun once sold her and her husband's original flowers and pictures of ladies in the Louvre, but found that this original work did not attract the market's attention as expected, and business was weak. She moved out on 20 12. Business improved after the gallery moved to the village. "There are many tourists here, unlike the Louvre, where no one goes."

Yang Yi roughly estimated that the original paintings in Dafen Village accounted for 20% to 30%. Nowadays, the gallery gradually turns its attention to the domestic market, and the painter's painting style has also changed. Oil painting began to merge with Chinese painting, and many ink paintings with flowers and people as themes were shown by oil painting. Art forms gradually diversified, and Chinese painting, embroidery and sculpture all entered. Zheng Hong is one of the painters who moved from Dafen Village to Upper Judea. He told reporters that the oil painting base in Shangyou will send cars for free on a regular basis, and the rent will be free after going there. It has already gone to three or four batches.

Zheng Hong said, where food and shelter are included, the guaranteed salary is more than 2,000 yuan in January, and the guaranteed salary of high-level painters can be five or six thousand yuan. After completing the workload, there is also a commission.

After Zheng Hong went to Judah, he felt that the competitive pressure was not great. Unlike in Dafen village, there were thousands of people competing, but he came back after staying for a week. He is worried that the market there has not yet formed and the popularity is not strong. He is worried that the painting will not be sold in the future and no one will place an order. If he leaves Dafen village for too long, his regular customers will forget him.

Dongguan and Nanjing have also built oil painting bases one after another to build a comprehensive oil painting industry art base integrating oil painting creation, production, display and sales. But there are not many successful cases.

Wang Weili, director of the Institute of Culture of Shenzhen Academy of Social Sciences, told the reporter of China Business News that local governments did not fully consider market factors when they intervened in the cultural industry, some for political achievements, and some wanted to become bigger, but they did not have the ability to judge and grasp the market.

He added that in the initial stage, the government's support for land, talents and rents is large enough to enable enterprises to go better, but whether they can form their own competitiveness and scale in the future ultimately depends on the market.

In Wang Weili's view, Dafen Village is a spontaneously formed market with innate advantages. Relying on mature environments such as Shenzhen and Hong Kong, it is difficult to be replaced in the short term. "Beijing and Shanghai have developed cultural industries, and many famous painters have famous galleries and original paintings with high value content. There are also paintings, but they have not formed such a large scale and their positioning is different. Shenzhen is mainly for export. "

Wang Weili said that up to now, Dafen Village is still dominated by line drawing, which is at the low end of the cultural industry chain and has low added value. Although the academic school despises it, its existence is reasonable, which meets part of the market demand and can provide some cultural atmosphere for Shenzhen, which lacks cultural resources.

However, he is worried that if the oil painting bases in other places have market environment and artificial advantages and can solve the channel problem, the competitive pressure in Dafen Village will increase sharply. "Simply relying on low manpower and rent is definitely unsustainable. The cost of living and labor in Shenzhen has risen rapidly, and the momentum has not diminished. "

In his view, in addition to originality, the combination of oil painting and China art forms, as well as the derived industrial chain, such as cultural tourism, distribution, wholesale and retail of oil painting raw materials, are all directions that can be explored.