Van Gogh on Demand argues that the global contemporary art world is shaped by two powerful ideas: the postmodern assertion of "the death of the author" and the universalist notion that "everybody is an artist." It does so by focusing on an unlikely case of global art production, China's Dafen Oil Painting Village, a flexible production center of eight thousand Chinese painters who produce five million oil paintings per year, sourced from the Western art canon and made for the world's retail and wholesale markets. Based on five years of fieldwork in this transnational trade, this study offers, first and foremost, a comprehensive account of this "readymade" art. Assessing its full theoretical impact, however, its narrative centers on two unique sets of "authors": internationally-active artists who made Dafen village into a source of appropriated paintings and a subject of conceptual art; and the Chinese party-state, which turned Dafen village into a model cultural industry and the subject of extensive propaganda spanning television and the World Expo. In examining the encounter between contemporary artists and the Dafen painters whose labor they appropriate, the study traces critical issues of artistic authorship and assesses their deployment at a site of anonymous production. In examining how this encounter operated within the Chinese government's embrace of creative industries and its attendant production of creative subjects, it offers an account of art practices in a period of cultural shifts heightened by an ascendant China.
Winnie Wong
Vita
Winnie Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other non-art challenges to authorship and originality. Her research is based in the southern Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and her writing engages with Chinese and Western aesthetics, anthropology, intellectual property law, and popular culture. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015. She was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2010-2013). She is currently associate professor of Rhetoric and History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.
Research Areas
Labor and Creativity
Modern and Contemporary Art
Art and Law
China Studies
Publications (Selection)
Edited Volumes
Reconsidering the 2006 MIT Visualizing Cultures Controversy: National Histories, Visual Cultures, and Digital Dissent, co-edited with Jing Wang, positions: asia critique, February 2015. (Awarded CELJ Best Special Issue 2015).
Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Urban Model, co-edited with Mary Ann O’Donnell and Jonathan Bach (University of Chicago Press: February 2017).
Van Gogh On Demand: China and the Readymade, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Japanese edition: Tokyo: Seidosha Press, 2015.
Articles
“Not Exactly the Same: On the Fantasy of Chinese Architectural Copies,” ed. A. Lawrence and A. Miljacki, in Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange (London: Routledge), January 2018.
“Lover of the Strange, Sympathizer of the Rude, Barbarianologist of the Farthest Peripheries,” Conjectures series ed. D Graham Burnett, The Public Domain Review, July 2017.
“Speculative Authorship and the City of Fakes,” in “New Media, New Publics?” Current Anthropology 58:S15, Feb 2017.
“Time is Money, Efficiency is Life,” in “Reflections on Durational Art,” Representations, 136:1, Fall 2016.
Occasional Pieces
“Genius from Nowhere, Postcards from Matthew Wong,” in Matthew Wong, Postcards, Karma Books, NY, 2020.
“On Smallness in Hong Kong Art,” M+ Museum of Visual Culture, Podium, No. 1.
“Arresting Development: Winnie Wong on China’s Museum Boom,” Artforum, Nov 2015.
