Dafen Oil Painting Village
Narrow alley district of hundreds of studios selling hand-painted oil replicas and original works.
This guide to Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen opens on an order that changed a quiet farming village of fewer than three hundred people: fifty thousand paintings due in fourteen days. It follows Hong Kong artist Huang Jiang, who arrived in 1989 to churn out replicas of Van Gogh, da Vinci and Rembrandt with twenty recruited painters, and the sample he mailed to Walmart in the early 1990s that brought that order back. From there it traces how word spread and workshops multiplied through the very alleyways you're walking now, on the way to becoming one of the world's biggest sources of oil paintings.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.