What happened to China’s fake Van Goghs?

Originally published at The Financial Times on Mar. 19, 2026

In a tree-lined alleyway in Dafen, a tiny village on the edge of China’s sprawling southern technology capital Shenzhen, painter Qiu Junbin gently corrects the brushstrokes of a girl attempting to reproduce a picture of a sweeping seascape. The girl’s mother snaps photos of them in front of the colourful display of artworks hanging on the walls of Qiu’s modest studio.

Qiu, 49, is leading one of the many “art experience” workshops that have cropped up in the past two years to attract tourists to Dafen, once known as the “world’s art factory”. This village of copyist painters has grown since 1989, when a Hong Kong entrepreneur relocated his replica oil painting studio to Dafen to take advantage of its lower labour and housing costs. By the mid-2000s, the village was producing 60 per cent of all new oil paintings worldwide. In 2018, Dafen’s art reproduction industry was reportedly worth 4.5bn yuan (around £480mn), with an estimated 8,000 workers (including artists, frame-makers and agents) selling replicas of pieces by Van Gogh, Warhol and others to consumers and retailers across the globe.

But in recent years, Dafen has come under threat. Following economic decline and the pandemic, demand for such goods has fallen, first internationally, then also domestically. Consumer tastes are also changing in China, where there has been a push to shed the nation’s reputation as a global centre for knock-off manufactured goods. Such developments, coupled with the emergence of new technologies such as AI, have sparked concerns about the viability of Dafen’s model.

According to Qiu, the village’s future has always hinged on the pragmatism of its community, historically consisting of entrepreneurial migrants. Originally from Jiangxi, a southeastern province of China, Qiu moved to Dafen 20 years ago when the village was first gaining global recognition. Like most, Qiu started off making replica oil paintings of famous masterpieces, but quickly transitioned to creating his own artwork: realist paintings of everyday life. “Everyone is always seeking new ways to survive,” he says.

In the early 2000s, Dafen’s state-led rebranding of the village from a site for industrial art reproduction into a creative hub was already under way, with the Shenzhen government investing in various projects to promote the village as a cultural centre and launching the publicly funded Dafen Art Museum in 2007. This decades-long cultural reinvention has led to huge transformations in the village space itself, with studios and galleries increasingly being replaced by cafés and hostels catering to tourists.

Now, there are a growing number of galleries showing traditional Chinese artwork such as calligraphy or shanshui natural landscapes, rather than western masterpieces. Many artists have also started selling their works on e-commerce platforms targeting upwardly mobile consumers, or launched “art experience” workshops like Qiu’s, which currently make up about 30 per cent of his revenue. In 2021, China Daily reported there were about 2,500 digital shops operated by Dafen businesses, which accounted for more than half of the village’s annual output.

Although Qiu is one of an estimated 400 artists producing original artwork in the village, the majority of his income still comes from fulfilling orders from existing customers and retail stores: replicas and small scale made-to-order pieces. But these have rapidly decreased since he first set up shop. “There’s a growing demand for Chinese-style art,” he says.

Qiu and his wife, also an artist, are based in Dafen; other painters he employs now live elsewhere, completing orders off-site when needed. Recent challenges have included rising rental costs and growing competition from young artists looking to break into the industry, Qiu adds.

Dafen’s painters have long struggled for legitimacy. Even the concept of the village itself raises complex questions about what constitutes “real” art.

Winnie Wong, an art historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (2014), says the state-sponsored promotion of originality in Dafen has generated opportunities for people without formal art training or social networks to become an artist. Unlike in the art world’s upper echelons, the definition of legitimate art is more complex in Dafen, where there are many forms of artmaking, from painting speculatively to producing standardised commissions. “It’s generated all these creative attempts by people to envision a new kind of life,” Wong says.

But the artists who do emerge from Dafen rarely have an easy time navigating China’s elite art world. “I’ve also witnessed many Dafen artists try to find ways to leave and open other kinds of galleries, to use social media and try out new forms of artmaking,” says Wong. “These attempts are not that successful and they often find their way back, feeling like they have to go back to making so-called copy art.”

Yang Huaxi, a 55-year-old artist who first came to Dafen in 2005, is one of the few painters in the village who now solely produces original artwork — a choice he admits he was only able to make because he has other sources of income. 

Unlike many who came to work in Dafen with little to no painting experience, Yang studied art at Guizhou University before he opened two galleries in Dafen. After a decade of running both, he shut them down in 2017 to pursue further artistic studies, at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University as well as abroad.

Now, Yang owns two studios, one in Dafen and another in Guangzhou, where he says the market for art sales is much better. His paintings typically sell for hundreds of thousands of yuan (tens of thousands of pounds); much higher than many others in the village, Yang says. “In Dafen, great works don’t necessarily sell at a good price, which is quite awkward. It’s a low-end industry, when art should be something transcendental. If you have good work, when people see it comes from Dafen, they sneer at it. People think it’s a place for commercialised goods, not professional art.”

Kiki Tianqi Yu, who co-directed the documentary China’s Van Gogh’s (2016), echoes Yang’s sentiments. Shenzhen has a reputation of being highly profit-driven, and so people would typically go there to set up more commercial art ventures. But this has its advantages: there’s still a market for commercial consumption and Chinese-style decorative art — one that Dafen is uniquely positioned to serve, she says.

“[Dafen] is very good at adapting a style for mass production, either through human hands or AI,” Yu says. “In Beijing and Shanghai they wouldn’t have the space and production line to produce this for domestic or international mass consumption, but Dafen has that base.”

Qiu’s plan is to keep “walking both paths”, producing both replicas and original paintings while also searching for new ways to make art.

Recently he has started using AI as a tool to help him generate ideas and work on composition. Qiu believes the technology will help rather than replace Dafen’s artists, who after all specialise in hand-painted works, whether copied or original. “We have a long history here,” he says. “People are resilient and adaptable. If one path isn’t working, we’ll find another.”