Review, China's Van Gogh's: The Village That Paints Thousands of Fake a Year

China's Van Gogh's: The Village That Paints Thousands of Fake a Year is a stunning documentary offered free on YouTube.

I'd not heard of Dafen, a suburb of Buji, Longgang, Shenzhen, in the province of Guangdong, China, before watching this documentary.

The area is an artists' village specializing in replicas of Van Goghs and other classical masterpieces.

The documentary profiles Zhao Xiaoyong and his family who produce Van Goghs, a favorite subject of this oil-painting village. 

Each year hundreds of thousands of masterpiece replicas are produced in Dafen yet if you do the currency conversion, you realize most of these painting studios are averaging less than $2,000.00 a month.

The hours are excruciatingly long. The work is arduous and hard on the body. The painters paint, eat, sleep, and live in the studios. The head of the painting family tries to balance paying workers, purchasing materials, meeting orders which usually number in the hundreds of paintings of various sizes, training new painters, and raising a family.

Zhao Xiaoyong has been doing this since he was young. He desperately wants to go to the Netherlands to visit the Van Gogh museum and take advantage of his main client's offer of hospitality. 

He dreams of Van Gogh and is entranced by the artist and his work, but paying airfare is a sacrifice that means scrimping on other necessities of life.

He goes anyway and is devastated to see his replicas in nothing more than a souvenir shop where his client sells his work for much more than the little he pays Zhao. 

You can feel the painter's depression at seeing his life's work in the paintings on display and realizing his client is getting rich while he is barely making a living.

When he returns home, he has an adjustment period in which he confronts his emotions and begins putting those turbulent emotions into original work done in the Van Gogh style.

His paintings are full of life and emotion. They're stunning. 

He now sells his original artwork as well as taking orders for replicas. The portrait he did of his 92-year-old grandmother is breathtaking.

This visually stunning documentary doesn't just touch emotions—it makes one feel the emotions inherent in the struggle to make a living, the fierce need to take care of family, the childhood hurts that follow one into adulthood, the desire to create that bubbles inside, the discouragement of feeling what one wants is beyond reach, and finally, following what the heart wants and finding peace and joy.

Takeaway Truth

I hope you'll watch this documentary. With the artistic elements aside, you'll once again see that people are the same the world over with the same emotions and desires.

Starry Night by Van Gogh Image by user1469083764 from Pixabay 

Sunflowers by Van Gogh Image by Prawny from Pixabay.