Inside The Fine Art Factories of China | Hacker News Reader

Inside The Fine Art Factories of China

instapainting.com

252 pointschrischen83 comments

I've visited Dafen several times, had conversations with artists there, and purchased some paintings. The quality ranges from gradeschool-esque to fine art, even if most of it isn't original. I have no problems with factory-style creation of art, either. If people don't buy it, they won't create it. The vast majority goes to commercial properties looking for semi-generic-but-in-a-specific-style-or-color-scheme art for their public spaces or private rooms, and although it's blatantly obvious how crappy a hotel room painting is, it still beats staring at blank walls.

These folks have found yet another way too bootstrap themselves out of poverty, and with startups like instapainting or https://www.nobilified.com/, it's easier than ever for them to have a global reach. Good for them! Good for us!

Here is the problem: why can't we have these guys painting actual art?

A decade ago I was visiting the Dominican Republic and saw street vendors who sold touristy paintings that took them less than an hour to complete. Beach, sunset, palm. They weren't good but they were unique.

We have both:

People who paint photos as our main product, and people doing creative art: http://www.instapainting.com/artists.

But most people just go for turning a photo to a painting. It's simply where the market and demand is.

That slightly different, what I didn't like was the following picture, filled with identical works: https://www.instapainting.com/blog/assets/factory.jpg

Those exist in China, as well as the artists you describe, as well as smaller studios doing anything from copying paintings to passion pieces.

We don't use the one in the picture because they basically just mass produce things for Kmart, Wal-Mart, etc, but the smaller studios are usually actual artists that can do custom pieces.

They do. The article gives an unfair impression of Dafen. It isn't just these assembly lines of mechanical make-work to churn out thousands of what essentially have more in common with a numbered print than a bespoke painting.

There are also hundreds of smaller shops, and thousands of individual artists who do direct commission work for customers and patrons. There are also formal galleries with beautiful collections of truly fine pieces. It's a sight to behold, for sure.

My favorite painting from there is about 3'x4'and cost about $190. I then paid about $400 to have it re-stretched and framed when I got home. :-/

Yes, the bottom half of the article talks about the misconception of China as just full of assembly-line factories.

We visited the smaller studios too and they are actually the ones supplying oil paintings for Instapainting.com.

"Here is the problem: why can't we have these guys painting actual art?"

Ever created visual art? Most art you see is commercial art. Capital-A, Art is personal. To create an original piece of art takes a lot of effort, be it something visually inspiring, a novel concept or deeply felt emotion. Apply some technique and maybe you might come up with something good, maybe?

"En plein air" isn't always practical.

Think of a photographs used in the way you describe, as the "Cheeze-Wiz" of inspiration for commercial art.

I don't know. Isn't that backwards? "If its easy, its not real" is too simple.

Art may be defined by the artists' effort, or by the effect is has. Plenty of folks are impressed/astounded by 'street art'. Why is it not real, just because the artist had the chops to make it look easy?

"Isn't that backwards? "If its easy, its not real" is too simple."

good point @Joe, what I'm trying to explain is, it's inspiration that's hard. The Muse. Art that comes easily, rarely looks/feels bad.

Kinda off tangent, I thought it looked super familiar, and then realized that example painting of the guy raising a glass is based off this:

http://www.c-ville.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/GATSBY.png

This was a fascinating read. Surprised that painters have seemingly good working conditions, set their own hours, and work from home!

Just a random idea: when targeting mid-market customers, have you considered going "Watsi" style? Instead of an Instapainting storefront, what about commissioning artwork directly from painters? Display the painter's name, their photo, number of previous paintings painted, and their affordable price to commission a painting.

Effectively, you could become the Internet-version of those studios themselves.

I'd like to see an undercover investigation. This piece ended up being a little too close to propaganda.

Well we visited both the factory style places as well as the small studios. We also talked to individual artists privately. I'm not sure what you're hoping for here.

How about: 1. turnover? 2. materials toxicity? 3. living conditions? 4. any way to enforce that what you see as fair practices stays that way once you scale way up?

We're pretty small (painting 10,000 paintings per month is a solved problem, but we're not close to that volume), so we can't really enforce anything. We didn't really detect any unhappiness with any of the smaller studios (we didn't talk to workers in the factories). According to the studio heads, they usually recruited friends and ex-artist coworkers. Right now we only work with the smaller studios since we only do custom non-mass-produced work.

I can however answer #2. Oil-based paints are in fact toxic, and known to the State of California to cause cancer. You will see the signs plastered in the oil paints aisle of Blick's and Utrecht stores. This is especially apparent when you consider the name of some colors like "Cadmium red." Most oil paints, if not all, contain lead as well.

Lead is uncommon in artist's oil paints in the U.S. One of the most widely distributed brands has lead in exactly one of the the hundred+ colors they offer. That said, don't put your oil paints or solvents in your mouth.

> This is especially apparent when you consider the name of some colors like "Cadmium red."

That's a little unfair. Using #E30022 on a website doesn't mean the website has cadmium in it, and the same is true for paint - "Cadmium red" is a color, not an ingredient list. Per Wikipedia, "The cadmium pigments have been partially replaced by azo pigments. These have significantly inferior lightfastness, but still good, and they have the advantage of both being cheaper and non-toxic."

The paragraph preceding what you quoted also had this to say: "Cadmium sulfide is not very toxic (LD50 > 5000 mg/kg) when used as a pigment, although acute exposure to cadmium vapors from welding is harmful." In the case of these workers there are many details missing (whether they're using cadmiums, whether there is more exposure risk) but at least here in the US, all cadmiums I own are real and come with datasheets such as the one below:

http://d4of2brjuv1jo.cloudfront.net/assetfiles/f4fd8b8f-8fb5...

Azo colors, from manufacturers I am familiar with anyway, name their products as such ("Azo Yellow" instead of "Cadmium Yellow").

http://d4of2brjuv1jo.cloudfront.net/assetfiles/bad43b91-5026...

Regarding CSS color names, I would hope that anyone who actually recognizes the word cadmium would be aware that there pixel is not suddenly made of zinc and that their seagreen background has not suddenly become saltwater. Now if it were the other way around, i.e. the names had always been arbitrary and suddenly someone decided it would be a great way to stick hazardous chemicals into things..!

There is at least one popular brand that does use toxic chemicals: http://d4of2brjuv1jo.cloudfront.net/assetfiles/9fffc54c-1b49...

"Toxicological information: ... The soluble cadmium content in the pigment is less than 5ppm. Only large volumes may have adverse impact on human health."

I paint. A large proportion of the pigments I use are indeed toxic, as the non-toxic substitutes are markedly inferior in both lightfastness and saturation. Lead is now quite uncommon thanks to zinc and titanium oxide pigments, but cadmium, cobalt, chromium and manganese compounds are widely used in high quality paints. In practice, this toxicity is a non-issue if you're sensible enough not to lick your brushes.

Chinese painters are probably less likely to use toxic pigments than their western peers for reasons of cost - a good quality cadmium paint is two to three times more expensive than a non-toxic substitute.

Decent working conditions, flexible hours, desirable job, in China?! That's blasphemy!

Well, the desirable job part might be stretching it...more like shitty job in a highly respected profession.

That's true, the artists that do the photo to painting aren't necessarily ecstatic about signing their names on it.

Respected?

I don't think being an artist is "respected" even in the West, much less so in China, where everybody is focused on highly lucrative professions like business, finance, and ahem government service.

Supposedly they are now child labor free. https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/04/01/no-chi...

I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall a semi indie Chinese movie a out a protagonist who happens to work for one of these kinds of shops which make art for foreign markets. It was a while ago, so don't recall title, etc.

Seth Godin talks about Dafen in a bunch of his books. There is an entire section of the town that just makes monkey paintings. My favorite anecdote is about one of his monkey paintings that inexplicably has what looks like a teardrop on it. He said he was confused about this for a while, but then realized what must have happened -- some rain got on one of the paintings, and from then on everyone just kept copying the smudge. (Part of a larger riff about how not everyone who makes paintings or whatever is an artist.)

I'd be interested in reading this. Can you point me to a specific book?

He talks about this in his book Linchpin, but he talks about it in a bunch of other places as well:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22seth+godin%22+dafen&oq=%2...

In college my friend told me about this gig selling art that I took him up on. We picked up a moving truck from a warehouse and drove it to a city about 20 hours away and set up art sales in hotels. When I asked the owner of the operation where the paintings were from he said Asia.

The paintings themselves appeared to be legitimate paintings. Most were different, but a few were very similar to other paintings packed into the truck. Often an object in the painting was moved slightly. Some even looked like classic paintings, I found one or two variations of Van Gogh's Starry Night, as mentioned in OP's article.

Each one of these paintings sold for about $40-$100, depending on size.

I made decent money for a college kid but I declined a second gig as I was concerned about where these paintings were coming from. I pictured a sweatshop like scenario with painters inhaling fumes while getting paid pennies for each painting. It's good to hear that probably isn't the case, at least according to this article. The paintings were also marketed as being painted by "starving artists" and the whole operation felt a little dishonest.

The only thing that Instapainting and similar businesses demonstrates is that bad photos don't make good paintings, especially when they're paint-by-numbers copies of bad photos. IMHO most of Instapainting's customers would be better off applying a "painterly" filter in Photoshop to their photos and have them printed to canvas at their nearest Costco.

Paintings of photos look like paintings of photos because they're crippled by the artefacts of the source photo such as unnatural perspective (which is why the "normal" 50mm lens is a thing), inaccurate colours and clipped highlights due to the limited dynamic range of even pro-level DSLRs.

Professional painters take years to hone their craft and learn the rules of composition that make a painting look good. E.g., one of my favourite painters is the watercolour virtuoso Joseph Zbukvic. Here's a video where he quickly paints an impressionistic Melbourne street scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81w9PBZOmZ8. Because he's not slavishly copying the photo he's free to rearrange the composition and add elements to make it more pleasing. He makes it look easy but that's because he's one of the best.

Buying original paintings from professional artists doesn't have to be that expensive. This past weekend I attended a group art show opening in Melbourne and prices ranged from $450 to $2200 for some very nice original oil & watercolour paintings. If you can afford to live in the Bay area or most other large cities in the developed world, you can afford to occasionally pay that much for a painting.

(Most of the stuff churned out by the "contemporary art" scene can be safely ignored. At the very high end contemporary art isn't art as much as it is an unregulated private currency for the very rich to launder and move around their wealth. Most contemporary art disappears without a trace.)

> Buying original paintings from professional artists doesn't have to be that expensive. This past weekend I attended a group art show opening in Melbourne and prices ranged from $450 to $2200 for some very nice original oil & watercolour paintings.

Yep you're right. Our creative art section at http://www.instapainting.com feature artists from the Bay Area as well as New York, and their prices are actually even lower than the ones you listed. They're only a little bit more costly than market rate photo to painting.

"IMHO most of Instapainting's customers would be better off applying a "painterly" filter in Photoshop to their photos and have them printed to canvas at their nearest Costco."

That works quite well, especially if you use one of the better inkjet printers with six or seven inks, print on canvas, and finish off with a sprayed clear coat. This is called "Giclée".[1]

There's already an online service for this.[2] You can even see what the result will look like before you order. Price is about $30-$50/square foot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée [2] http://www.canvaspress.com/

Yea, we offer high quality archival canvas prints printed on demand through our sister site: http://www.amanufactory.com

There isn't just an online service for this, there are literally thousands.

Wow Joseph Zbukvic is impressive.

Brings back my horror art lessons in school. We had a watercolour artist as an art teacher and we had to use those big hair brushes too. Too bad I sucked completely with this brush and hated going to art class.

But it's really impressive watching what this guys doing ! Thank you for the link.

Chris: I've seen at least half a dozen of these businesses come and go. None of them seem to be able to scale enough to make for an exciting long-term business worth reinvesting in. Despite individuals absolutely loving the final product. Any thoughts on why this is, and how you can succeed where others have failed?

We're completely bootstrapped, so we don't have unrealistic investor expectations or valuation targets to achieve or else implode. I think that's probably the primary reason most of these businesses disappear.

They either invest a lot of money themselves or raise money from investors with the hope of making it back in profits that don't come (for whatever reason).

I started Instapainting with a negative bank balance, so everything we've done has been optimized to increase revenue and efficiency.

Why does your blog post say you're backed by YC if you're bootstrapped?

We ran out of YC (and other investor's money), and pivoted to this to make money.

clearly they were bootstrapped by YC

Robots

> And it likely played well with Western executives, who preferred to hear that their product was being mass produced in factories rather than subcontracted to rural artists.

Absolutely fascinating! That's quite an interesting discussion point.

I'm somewhat surprised no one has of yet written an algo that can do this sort of thing on demand.

Would it even matter it was automated if it did a good job? Are these artists is Dafen nothing but automatons, waiting to be replaced by some AI and a modded 3d plotter?

Personally, I would not care how it was produced if I wanted such a painting.

We have been trying:

https://www.instapainting.com/ai-painter

https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robot...

https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-pa...

Now the trick is to bridge the gap between the neural net algorithm and the physical robot.

Unfortunately this photo to line drawing is the best we can do so far: https://twitter.com/instapainting/status/636245176554405892

It exists!: https://vimeo.com/68859229

I have a knockoff (or a 'copy', as some like to say) Yue Minjun piece from one of these places. Aside from a couple minor flaws, it's actually fairly high quality. Having it framed was about 13x more expensive than the painting itself.

The economics of framing are tricky too. Frames are actually just as cheap in China FOB price, especially if they are a mass-produced size. Even if not mass-produced, a frame from China would be priced in line with a custom painting.

The issue is that shipping prices are by weight, and the frames are usually much more heavy than a piece of canvas. This significantly drives up the total price of a frame from China, and lets American framing companies charge much higher prices.

Pro tip: get the artwork in a size that already fits a standard frame size and you'll save a ton of money.

To add to your tip about standard frame size, you can also add a mat to make a piece fit into a standard frame.

>The issue is that shipping prices are by weight, and the frames are usually much more heavy than a piece of canvas

Which is precisely why I brought the canvas home in a tube.

>Pro tip: get the artwork in a size that already fits a standard frame size and you'll save a ton of money.

Eh. I looked at such options, but wasn't impressed. Ended up settling on a fairly oddball, incandescently red glossy frame. Goes well alongside the subjects (a bunch of PLA guys).

As an aside, the custom framing business in the US is a high ROIC business with have regional economies of scale (implies local but not national scalability and hence sustainable competitive advantage) which is dominated by a company that was bought by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.

Custom framing is expensive. Standard size frames are actually reasonably priced. What I ended up doing is to find a standard size frame first, then find the painting that fixes the frame. It's kind of backward but it works.

Been a few times. Very cool place with tons of artwork. The originals are hard to find but even the replications and copies are fascinating and watching people do it is very interesting.

Exploitation?

And now I know why so many fine artists can't find work unless it is purely original work (a highly volatile market). I am saddened deeply that even art has degraded to this. if you want a print, buy a print from a printing machine. You want an oil painting? Hire or barter with a local artist to do so. I can't even. I just can't even.

Aside from respecting geopolitical borders and nationalistic allegiance, why should I value a local artist any more than an artist in China? Is the Chinese artist somehow lesser than the local artist?

Yep. Even The Simpsons outsources lower-level animation to South Korea.

is synthetic vanilla `less than` real vanilla? People are not the problem here, the product is. It lacks in the POINT of art.

Art is like going to a concert, an expression of the human condition. Why go if you can listen to a perfect mix of it at home?

How you get a painting is part of the reason you get the painting at all. The story behind it is just as much of the point as the piece itself.

To be clear: If you are in China, buy art from a Chinese artist. If you are in Brazil, buy art from a Brazilian artist.

I think the downvotes are coming from the following interpretation of your comment: No true Artsman buys art internationally.

likely. but that wasn't my intent.

Are you really saying that people buying these pictures are buying it for the wrong reason? That their point of buying it is wrong?

It sounds an awful lot like you are trying to project your values on to others. If people agreed with you, they wouldn't buy these paintings. And yet they do, in great numbers.

Some people just want a painting to decorate a wall somewhere, not to tell a story. And doing that, I wouldn't care one bit where it was painted or how many other copies were made.

>why should I value a local artist any more than an artist in China? //

As I see it part of the function of art is to reflect on the culture the artist is in or a part of. This can't be done authentically from afar.

Another element of this is that artists should be expanding our minds, making us think is one purpose of many artistic creations (some would say that's what makes it art). Partly, I feel, for a society to continue to develop effectively it needs to patronise elements on its philosophical fringes that can move beyond the norms of groupthink, beyond the acceptable establishment paths of thought and then present the ideas experienced in a way that makes others question their position and the progress of that culture.

If we take away the bread and butter work of burgeoning artists then in order to have artists in our local culture that can serve this function in society we need to create some other means to support them.

A foreign artist can't honestly reflect on a culture they haven't experienced, an immigrant artist who comes to experience a new culture can create art that serves both their native culture and the culture they newly experience however - but you can't do that [in the same way] from a room half-way around the globe IMO.

I've spent some time thinking about what you wrote. I think you bring up some very good points.

>Another element of this is that artists should be expanding our minds

I would agree, but I would disagree that art from the Chinese artists in question can't accomplish this. If you saw a painting that came from there, but didn't know its provenance, could it not accomplish this? Would learning where it came from change how you felt about it? One might say these artists are simply copying photographs people send them, and they are, but they are still human reproductions and there is inevitably some element of interpretation on the part of these artists in producing the paintings. As I see it, that is art, and it is no less intrinsically valuable, kitschy as it may be.

Actually, artists here can find work. I have many friends who do commissions at a constant rate. Some of them are listed in the creative art marketplace: http://www.instapainting.com/artists. They also work in film, animation, video game companies.

It's true if you're just straight up copying a photo, you're going to have to compete with the Chinese commercial art industry. But they don't do creative work, so any amount of deviation from just copying a photo and you'll have a leg up.

Frankly artists here don't want to copy photos, and even the studio artists we interviewed in China don't want to do that either. But it's a steady source of income for them.

I'd suggest you talk to some artists here first and get their opinion, and then talk to some of the artists in China, because that's what I did.

I haven't been to China specifically, but I have been to Germany, Japan, Mexico, Canada, all over the USA, Poland, and France. I HAVE spoke with painters, not normally by choice lol (because my wife is one) and universally the pinch is felt. Reproduction work is the bread and butter of most fine artists to pay for their living and fund their original work.

Oh and the PAINT alone in the USA ranges from the crazy gonna like posion you cheap (~5 bucks/color US dollars) to expensive (80 bucks/color US dollars). That doesn't even cover canvas, brushes, or space to paint in. lets not forget about time. A persons' time is worth something too. Explain to me how an artist can survive with material costs like that on 50-400 a painting when it takes hours/days for one person to paint a reproduction.

[edit] I forgot about gesso, that isn't cheap either.

You have to realize that if they're being pinched, then they're being pinched by competition from Chinese artists and globalization.

Like I said, if you want to be explained how the Chinese artists are surviving, then ask one in China. Dafen is a huge tourist destination and is not actually a secret "village."

no they are being pinched by the artificial devaluation of a currency in comparison to other currencies set by a foreign government. If all other things were held true and this was global market, this wouldn't work. My argument holds true historically as nations 'grow up'. This is exploitation, pure and simple.

An artists consumes food and housing and produces art. Chinese artists can barter enough food and housing for their art for the equation to work out, but American artists cannot.

Our default assumption would be that cost of goods are equal in US and China. This seems to be true for the output, but not the input. So the reason that artists in America cannot make it is that housing and food is more expensive than in China.

Why is it cheaper to live in China then the USA? Because China has a huge import/export deficit and artificial devaluation of currency. It does not play part to the global economy like others do through deliberate manipulation. It remains true that this is simple exploitation on a national scale.

With all of the conservatives crying foul over "hyperinflation" as the US pushes QE just a little bit to get us over the financial crisis... we will virtually never have a political environment that will explicitly devalue currency to encourage job growth here in America.

Just saying, not enough support to do what you want to do.

If food is more expensive in USA than in China, why do they sell it in China rather than sell it in USA? 1. Cost of freight 2. Import tariffs.

Why is housing more expensive? 1. More expensive land (more desirable place to live) 2. More expensive to build house. a) Higher labour costs (can't just import cheap chinese labour because of visas) b) Stricter building codes.

There might be some currency manipulation, but it is not the 600% difference that would be required, plus we probably get an equal amount of benefit by being the reserve currency.

It's cheaper to live in China than the USA because Americans expect that they will have a salary + medical benefits that will allow them to afford a 3 bedroom house of their own in the suburbs built to rather more exacting construction standards than China, 2 cars which they drive 20k miles/year, a family vacation every year, medical prices that cover the cost of doctors purchase insurance to protect against litigious Americans' expensive lawsuits, and pay taxes that support large social programs and one of the world's largest standing Armies. Prices for American workers and goods reflect these expectations.

It's a lot easier to live cheaply when your expectations of housing are a concrete room (shared by a number of friends if you are single), no car, no overseas vacations via plane, medical care provided by the state, and a system where doctors are not at risk of multi-million dollar court cases if they get something wrong.

I think you're forgetting the most important part of the equation: China is still a developing country. In fact 50 years ago, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. As amazing as it's total GDP output is (by some measures more than the U.S. now) it has 5x the people. While yes there is some artificial currency devaluation, that is nowhere close to being the reason it's cheaper to live in China.

Haven't artists always been starving? Art isn't something that guarantees a paycheck.

I would counsel a "friendly local fine artist" who feels threatened by the existence of $100 paint-by-photograph artworks produced in China to get better about their marketing, differentiation, and sales process rather than lamenting the decline of art. If they're selling something this substitutes for... that's a very unfortunate business decision.

(Too many of my creative friends, for all values of "creative", are socialized to believe that treating their profession like it is a business will somehow suck all the magic out of that. If you like friendly-local-fine-artist, you owe it to them to help counteract years of indoctrination on this score.)

A young lady at a Renaissance fair produced an artistic work heavily inspired by a photo of Ruriko and I at our wedding. (She, incidentally, undercharged and had to be tipped into accepting a reasonable wage, then attempted to convince me that I was overtipping. Art culture: GAH!) That work is certainly available for less than what she charged... somewhere over in China, where middle class RenFair participants who are primed to spend money are presently not wandering while considering "Hey I wonder if I could get a wedding photo done as human art?"

A really smart business decision she made was a) bringing several samples of high-saliency events done in her signature style (weddings/graduations/etc) and b) hiring a barker, whose only job was selling passerby on artwork when she was producing it on the spot. Another smart decision was working directly with clients on the spot: that was a definite value add versus uploading the JPG into a CRUD app then shipping it halfway around the world. The venue handles a lot of customer selection for you, too -- you can imagine that "homemade using the techniques of the ancients; not like that factory-produced nonsense you'd find at BigBox" carries a lot of weight with many of the people who willingly bust themselves back to the Middle Ages for part of a day. (I'd note that pitch was successful at selling several hundred dollars worth of soap in a ten minute period I observed the soap store. Having used $20 of it myself, I can reliably report that P&G ROFLstomps your typical artisan on soap quality, but then again they don't sell any soap called Dragon's Blood, so decisions decisions.)

it's Dragon's Blood, I mean common, who can compete with that?!

But what if I want a painting of my buddy drunk at the office party, so I can give it to him as a gag gift?

This is actually a very common order request, but not even close to the weirdest.

Yeah, I kinda figured that would actually be the most common use case (gag gift for a funny picture).

At my office, people have been using fiver in a similar way - to order gag custom written songs for different people. We basically have theme songs for all our regular meetings now.

Because they don't have easy-to-find, affordable, clearly priced offerings?

Or because their supporters tell people to "buy a print from a printing machine" if they don't like their approach?

I think Art will survive this.

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