Inside The Fine Art Factories of Yiwu, China
instapainting.com
instapainting.com
Yiwu itself is something of an enigma. Most people in Silicon Valley haven't heard of it. It's not political like Beijing, it's not financial like Shanghai, and it's not electronics or fashion like Shenzhen/Guangdong. The land is barren so the area has focused on International Trade and Commodity Production. Most of it's goods don't even go to the US. Yiwu is the largest exporter of "petty goods" or "small commodities" in the world. What's a petty good? It's pretty much 100% of the things you would find in a dollar store and most of the things you would find in a Walmart. Cheap umbrellas, bags, metal pencil holders, hammers, hair dryers, pots, pans, artificial flowers, stock art, lawn ornaments, flashlights, hair clips, lucky cat figurines, toilet plungers, mailboxes and battery jumpers. I.e. most of the things you buy in stores that you don't eat (commodities). It's also usually the first thing that comes to mind when you hear "Made in China."
Yes, the Christmas mall is there. Yes it is an attraction. But it's not the main attraction.
There is a mall in Yiwu nick-named 'the Snake.' It's 4 miles long, 1000 feet wide and has representatives from over 100,000 companies. There's something like 50,000+ 10x10 foot stores. You could spend 6 seconds in each store and given another 3 seconds to walk between stalls you still wouldn't see the whole thing after a year. Given spaces change their stock or go out of business at least every 3 months you can't tackle this like a Sunday shopping trip.
The thing is though, all these booths? They're all wholesale. Most of the goods on display are commercial samples. Most of the clerks are representing factories or consortiums. Yes, you can go there to buy some touristy trinkets but you'll get dirty looks if you're not representing a 'Buyer' with a capital 'B'. You don't go there with a shopping cart; you go there with a business card and a promise to fill a 40 foot container every 2 weeks.
Buyers are sometimes from brand name stores looking to sell store-brand goods - those Walgreen's brand picture frame hangers? Bought at Yiwu. Pretty much anything you find at Claire's boutique. Anything you find on the check-out counter or in those cheesy glass curios at any truck stop in this country.
Most of the buyers however aren't American. They're from Brazil, they're from Africa, and in particular they're from the Middle East. After 2001 it became difficult for representatives from small business in the Middle East to get Visas for some of the US product exhibitions so they shifted their sourcing to Yiwu. These are guys that have a state level franchise like Railey's of Lebanon or Dollar Tree of Bangalore that need to fill shelves - frequently they'll buy whatever they get a good deal on if they hear the factory has excess or needs to liquidate stock because another buyer went belly-up. You go to north Dubai and you see a mirror image of the goods in Yiwu, just marked for consumer prices and packaged for individual sale.
So yeah, Yiwu has an office goods supply mall, a cabinet hardware mall, and yes, even a Christmas mall.
Stability is a good thing and seasonal goods in particular are problematic. If your company is producing something that requires very specialized tooling and training that's only in demand 1 month a year you're going to have a hard time keeping those trained workers around for the other 11 months.
The Christmas mall is a bit like this - they're open from March to May when buyers for TJMax and Tesco inspect goods and place orders. The factories are in production from June to September and then the stuff is sea-freighted out (1 month) to warehouse centers and fulfillment to prepare for the end of October, beginning of November delivery. Because of the seasonal nature, most of the prime-time work gets sub-contracted out to everybody and their auntie. This video has a pretty good look into what most of this production looks like: http://vimeo.com/92736460
For the most part, Christmas decor is low skill - just slather this plastic bit with chrome paint and sparkles. This makes it easy for factories to hire a bunch of workers on short notice and let them go again when demand drops off. Because the workers are seasonal there is little care that goes to protecting their well being. The conditions are bad, and after seeing it at the source, it's why I don't buy cheap seasonal decorations anymore.
At first I thought, "ugh, I'll never buy a Christmas decoration again!" But on second thought, maybe this industry is helping bring people out of poverty. Then again, all that waste is bad for the environment...
Unless it's your actual product going viral, it doesn't do much for SEO. It's just a good way to get your name out there.
So a slower process, but still one that should be worth it as long as your viral content is actually about your product and facilitating discovery of the product.
I think that's one of the problems: People pump out content that is only marginally about the actual product, and few people go on to visit the parts of the site you want to actually get people to link to.
As a painter [1][2] this sounds like paradise (minus the intermittent factory assembly line commercial-kitsch factor). Replace the shipping area with a framing/gallery floor and you have effectively created an amazing hub for creative output/rapid development of artistic talents. Place that building in a warehouse district and rent it out. The sheer amount of communication between a tight knit group of visual artists would lead to amazing amounts of growth. Throw in a middleman for national/regional outlets that need works of a specific subject/aesthetic at non-gallery pricing and it might be sustainable.
Startup dorm-factory when?
It's a big complex-style area of apartments + buildings, super walkable, and twice a year they open it up for a "Brewery Art Walk". Pretty incredible work there.
Makes me feel a bit weird wondering how successful / wealthy the artists need to be to afford living there though - Yiwu is a bit more affordable.
Edit to say: Although, this article is sort of an ad for Instapainting, so of course they're going to make things sound positive.
I am sure the factories of Communist China are completely open and transparent when western reporters go poking around, and do their utmost to ensure they have the most accurate information available.
So it would seem it's not quite like that. It's somewhat like that in that you can find the factories if you want - and there's pictures in the article - but at the same time that doesn't mean there's not also room for something less like manufacturing and more like art.
At the same time, I don't get the negativity. Lots of people do worse jobs. It seems some people are upset that something they see as a creative-only endeavour is being treated as manufacturing, but there's been painters studios with "manufacturing" for hundreds of years. The only thing that is new is the scale.
And while for some painters that will be all the commercial work they do, for others it's a way of getting experience and perfecting technique, the same way it has historically been. Or just a way to pay the bills to let them paint for enjoyment in their spare time - the proportion of artists of most kinds that can live of their art is miniscule most places.
And in Damien Hirst's studio, his "assistants" (i.e. artists) churn out countless spin and dot paintings which are sold as original artworks for thousands of pounds.
I think a lot of people (especially artists) don't realize or maybe don't like that in order for an artist to scale, they have to bring in help. As much as it sounds like the commercialization of a craft, I think these structures are important for the art economy to survive in this modern era of on-demand everything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takashi_Murakami [2] https://www.wired.com/2003/11/artist/
This is very different to getting assistants to create "original" dot paintings, working to a formula, where the artist's hand only intervenes to sign the work.
And I'm not saying it wrong, or not art, just that it is fundamentally different to the old tradition of studio assistants.
How much would he have charged for the commission?
I can say firstly that making a reasonable copy of a face or old master painting in oil on canvas takes a _lot_ of skill. It may or may not be art, thats another matter.
I wanted to comment to mention that, for someone who paints daily, it is most likely 8 to 20+ hours work to make a reasonable quality portrait in oil.
A tube of oil paint might cost anywhere from 7 to 40 dollars, then you have mediums, brushes, possibly studio space rental. The raw materials for cheap cotton canvas + stretcher might cost 15 dollars in the US, and a high quality linen support is much more expensive, more like 60 for a small painting. Ballpark.
For a US based artist, expect to pay something above 10hrs x $20/hr + 30 materials = $230 for circa 16x20 to 18x24 size.
So perhaps a fair baseline cost to produce a small portrait would be 250 dollars. Thats not accounting for an artist putting more time into it for his or her unique style. Some styles can be done more quickly of course. Its not going to be easy to pay rent if your doing that.. in fact its worth considering moving to a country where rent is much cheaper [ and I have done this at several times in my life ]
Reflecting on all this I'm happy that artisans and artists in china can have a reasonable standard of living doing this - we can all benefit from their work if we choose.
I have myself bought affordable violins made in china for my son, and they have been made to an exceptional standard, both playable good sound and excellent finishing. Without these chinese violin artisans we could not afford to work on playing beautiful music. Does that take away from local luthiers, perhaps not because they are likely at a much higher price level we could never afford, with brand recognition that is well deserved, and likely more time on the finer details you'd expect in a high end instrument. Its wonderful to have more playable instruments for young talented musicians.
One side effect that I don't like is the undervaluing of art and artisans in general - there are artists who live in the US and are working incredibly hard in their unique style and vision.. its a lottery, they may win and get a reputation and then earn good money for the work, but most never do. And there is such a deep pyramid of knowledge in art making, and in violin making .. I really want those dedicated people to be able to make a living.
Maybe patronage of the arts, is a tax that we self-impose when we have means, in order to keep our quality of life, preserve culture. Or perhaps it really should be covered some how by taxing very wealth companies more aggressively.
I like to think of myself as a code artisan, so I can appreciate and empathize to some extent with these violin-carving and oil-painting artisans.
yet the robots are coming ... I'm sure one day well look back on the craft of programming-by-hand with a wistful melancholy. I just hope when that day comes, we are sharing wealth and resources better among all of us.
But when I go to pricing, only the smallest is $100...Mixed media has items cheaper, but still, not exactly 'all but our largest size of paintings cost less than $100'
Am I looking at the right place, or has prices tripled in a year?
Clearly, the whole question of art as product has been endlessly addressed by Duchamp, Warhol and others - indeed, the whole Conceptual Art movement is in one sense a response to this question. But the sheer scale - and chutzpah - of this operation is staggering, and the fact it is using human skill and not automation makes it - oddly - appear quite modern and "disruptive" to Western eyes.
But... and this begs even more questions: I was talking to a well-known British painter just two days ago, and he was telling me his biggest (and most lucrative) market is China. So China is exporting cheap mass-produced art, and importing expensive, original art!
An intelligent image processing filter would be cool to, but I would want it for different reasons.
In Japan, I watched a robot paint portraits of live models. A person would sit on a bench, the robot would look at him, then dip a traditional horsehair brush in black ink and paint on paper on an easel. It was outline brushwork with different pressures creating variations in line thickness. The result was quite good--very clearly the live model in front of us.
This was in Tsukuba "Science City"... 32 years ago.
Fine art photography nowadays often involves an industrial inkjet printer.
Assistants painting dots after dots still makes a Damien Hirst for some reason.
There probably is a line somewhere, but it's far from clear where, and highly depends on your definition of "fine art". That the service discussed here is not "fine art" IMHO is easier to argue, but depends a lot on how much leeway the artists actually are given, less so on how many there are or how much they paint.
The basic aspect of art is that I as the artist make the decisions about what the painting is going to look like. Damien Hirst is a fine artist, his assistants are not (while they're working on his paintings obviously).
Certainly many, many artists throughout the centuries have painted commissioned work to survive, but when the customer demands an exact copy of the photo in another medium and the artist is allowed no subjective interpretation of the subject matter it ceases to be fine art.
China has economies of scale on a scale that the economists who coined the term economies of scale never imagined.
David Hockney is painting on an iPad these days, and I suppose printing it out on a commercial inkjet. So what is an original then. Just limiting the number of copies printed.
nevertheless, fascinating article. I saw these guys on reddit a while back and the way they described the city I guessed they'd have little problem with the production capacity - only quality control and delivery.
Here is a picture of a luxury condominium right at the entrance of Dafen "village". https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1700930/unspecified.jpeg
Many other areas where replica paintings are manufactured include Yiwu, Xiamen, and Beijing.
And you are right, it is not actually a village. It is just an area and another metro station in Shenzhen.
I can't corroborate this with a link but I saw the founder talk at a meetup and he said they were using it in production.
>Can we use this as a sample? If yes, we may display this on our website as an example.
NO (+$3.00) Yes (+$0)
Better framing would be:
NO (-$0) YES (-$3.00)