He came to Dafen in 2008, renting an apartment nearby with three other huagong, or "painting workers." But, although he already had a few years' training and could paint better than anybody back home, his work still wasn't good enough to be sold in Dafen. "Some customers would look at me as if I don't know the first thing about painting," he says. "They'd say, you think a painting like this can be sold?"
Then in 2008, the global financial crisis hit South China's manufacturing hub, and orders from overseas dropped drastically—sales were cut in half almost overnight, and official data showed that exports continued to fall annually by 52.3 percent in 2012 (today about half of Dafen's sales are to Chinese). Many assembly-line workers were laid off, and started renting wall space in the alleyways instead. Gradually, the village became what it is today.
During this time, though, a few painters still rose above the masses. Zhao Xiaoyong lived in Dafen from 1997 to 2012, working day and night to progress from the role of merely a copyist who reproduced Van Goghs en masse, to an original artist (yishujia). He now owns three galleries, and was even the subject of a documentary, China's Van Gogh.
It's Yang's hope to become like Zhao—to move from huagong to yishujia. Yang has dabbled in portraiture and landscapes—oils like that of Didu, the collie, and his own self-portrait, which hang on the wall like advertisements of his aspirations. But Yang also knows he's still a long way from achieving these goals. Right now, he is faced with the immediate pressure of survival, and the day-to-day work of finishing more orders for replica Western masterpieces. But from experience, he knows that Chinese customers like "bright, colorful artwork," and he has been painting bucolic works like "The Harvest" that have proved popular with mainland clients.
Yang's 30-year-old apprentice, Ma Chunyan, helps Yang with the orders, but had no prior experience when she began the gig last year. She didn't even know how to sketch, though had a keen sense of color: She could look at a painting and break it down to essences, its mixture of palettes. "For example, pale green mixed with lemon yellow is emerald green. It's almost instinctive for me, nobody ever taught me," she says.
She chose Van Gogh to learn from, "because his paintings don't require exquisite sketching skills; they are quite impressionist. You sketch a rough draft, then pile up layers of colors." (Dafen's original production-line assembly operated with a similar pattern, with each worker adding their own detail to a painting, then passing it along to the next).
Unlike Yang, who dreams of being an artist, Ma has treated the job as work from the very beginning. When she came to Dafen, she'd been practically bankrupt, trying several different fields before settling on painting, because "this is craftsmanship, a skill that can accompany you even when you get to your 60s, 70s."
Prior to Dafen, Ma worked in the manicure-and-makeup business for 10 years, opening different shops in different places. At the peak of her business, she remembers earning up to 8,000 RMB a day. But those days didn't last. In 2014, Ma opened up a shop in Dongguan, an industrial and textiles city in Guangdong, better known for its more underground industry. A couple of months later saw China's widest and strictest crackdown on the "sin city's" sex trade, an underground entertainment economy worth some 50 billion RMB a year. Ma's own business suddenly went down the drain.
"The street my shop was on used to be flourishing, there were traffic jams all the time. Then, overnight, everybody disappeared," she says. The economic contraction even trickled down to Dafen, whose many corporate clients included hotels in Dongguan that were closed in the crackdown. Ma herself lost 200,000 RMB. She struggled to open a salon in other cities but couldn't make anything last, so she decided to switch fields. For the next couple of years, she tried opening a fast-food restaurant, then a Taobao shop, before finally deciding on painting.
"You have to be in control of your own life," Ma says, though she is still making her way up in the trade. Even then, Ma has found that, once again, her success remains at the whim of the state. As early as 2006, the local Yangcheng Evening News reported that the local government has been helping Dafen's development. Ren Xiaofeng, director of the Dafen Management Office, said the government has been focusing on three areas that contribute to the fame of Dafen: improving the environment around the village, managing the market, and providing publicity.
　　
