Replicating out a living

Ou Zhiming churns out replicas of works by famous artist including Van Gogh and Monet in his room in Xiamen's Wushipu area.[Zhang Jing/China Daily]

For 11 hours every day, he replicates works like Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night at an 8-square-meter room in Wushipu area of Xiamen.

In his dimly lit studio, Ou paints Starry Night in different sizes, hangs them on walls and puts them on tables. There are also piles of Monet and the works of other Impressionist artists.

"Though they are all replicas, they don't look exactly the same. You can tell from the coloring. Some I spent only four or five hours and I will sell them at 150 yuan (17 euros) or so. For real good ones, I usually spend a day and a half on them and they cost 250 yuan or more," Ou says.

Like Ou, there about 4,000 artists in the community of Wushipu that work on replication or commercial painting. In the early 1990s, a few artists set up studios in the area and it has gradually acquired the nickname "Wushipu Oil Painting Village" as thousands followed suit. Artists from their late teens to their 40s fill out clients' requests for works including landscapes and portraits.

The total export value of oil paintings produced in Wushipu exceeded 600 million yuan (68 million euros) in 2009, says Wu Fu'an, a standing committee member of the Xiamen Oil Painting Association. Out of the 25 million oil paintings produced annually in Wushipu, about 90 percent go to Europe, the US and the Middle East, satisfying 30 percent of the world's demand.

Professor Huang Xiangzhong with Xiamen University attributes the rapid development of Wushipu to Xiamen's policy of developing the green sector, as oil painting pollutes little and its export has been tax exempt since the Ministry of Commerce issued a new policy on taxing exports in 2007.

The oil painting village has brought about a complete business chain. Ou says he gets an e-mail or QQ instant messages from his boss when an order is placed. He then e-mails the picture to a printing shop and gets it enlarged and printed on a canvas. After he receives the printed canvas, he covers it with oil paint. When he finishes the work, he mails it to his art dealer boss who then frames and distributes the paintings to clients in other cities such as Beijing and Shanghai to decorate restaurants or new houses. Ou says the streamlining is so efficient the whole process does not take more than 48 hours.

But Wu says Wushipu is facing severe competition and many art workers have moved elsewhere. Housing rentals in Wushipu have gone up significantly to 2,000 yuan a month for a two-bedroom apartment, while it only costs 600 yuan or so in Haicang district some 10 km to the east of the village. On the other hand, more people have joined the trade, lowering the property prices. There are at least two other oil painting hubs in China, one in Shenzhen of Guangdong province, and the other in Fujian province's Putian area.

Lin Binyuan, who specializes in replicating American artist Thomas Kinkade's landscape painting, lives with his wife and 2-year-old son in an 8-sq-meter room divided by half into a bedroom and a kitchen, which also serves as his studio.

"Life was much easier. Previously, I could earn about 5,000 yuan a month and now 3,000 yuan is already alot," Lin says.

Most of the art workers like Lin have no formal training in art. Instead, they have sped up their art education by paying about 10,000 yuan to tutors and getting trained to paint a certain genre. Some talented students can master the required painting skills within six months, starting from scratch.

"Without originality, those art workers are at the bottom rung of the business chain," Huang says.

Ou says he has never seen a real Van Gogh or Monet's works in museums and all he can do is imagine the original work from printed books. He cherishes the two Taschenbooks on Van Gogh printed in Germany. European clients gave him the books.

Ou says he took up painting to make a living, but gradually the painting "got into my blood".

"It's a way of life now. I would love to see Van Gogh's real paintings. I dream about going to an art academy one day to further my education and put my signature on my paintings."

Zhang Jing