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If you happen to be a painting lover visiting Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, there is a great place worth checking out: Dafen Oil Painting Village.
Dafen is a so-called “urban village” in the southern Chinese manufacturing megacity Shenzhen that once produced an estimated 60 percent of all the world’s oil painting. The village is home to approximately 5,000 workers and 800 shops. Many of its artists trained at art academies specialize in oil painting replicas of masterpieces by Picasso, Warhol, Monet, Rembrandt and others.
Dafen was once a farming and fishing village until 1989, when Huang Jiang, a Hong Kong entrepreneur and painter, moved there with a group of about 20 artists. He had been selling a few dozen copied paintings each month to foreign buyers, most from the United States and Europe. Huang was quite successful and the demand for replicas of paintings increased. Since then more and more artists took up residence shaping the Oil Painting Village we see today.
Whether you are looking for a reproduction of a famous painting or original art, this is definitely worth a visit. For as little as $20USD, one can walk away with a decent oil painting. There are a few artists painting portraits of families from photographs. You can negotiate a price and have them do it and they will mail it around the world.
Of course, if you don’t appreciate “copies” and think that very few paintings were worth buying, there still offers good art material for extremely cheap prices. Quaint café and gallery shops are available to people who want to spend a couple of hours on the weekend.
It is accessible by Metro Subway Line 3. Get off at Dafen Metro Station and take a 5 minute walk. You'll see a couple of signs pointing you towards the village.
