7 ms·

Inside The Fine Art Factories of China

252 points by chrischen 11y ago

sithadmin 11y ago
I have a knockoff (or a 'copy', as some like to say) Yue Minjun piece from one of these places. Aside from a couple minor flaws, it's actually fairly high quality. Having it framed was about 13x more expensive than the painting itself.
- chrischen 11y ago
  The economics of framing are tricky too. Frames are actually just as cheap in China FOB price, especially if they are a mass-produced size. Even if not mass-produced, a frame from China would be priced in line with a custom painting. The issue is that shipping prices are by weight, and the frames are usually much more heavy than a piece of canvas. This significantly drives up the total price of a frame from China, and lets American framing companies charge much higher prices. Pro tip: get the artwork in a size that already fits a standard frame size and you'll save a ton of money.
  - ben010783 11y ago
    To add to your tip about standard frame size, you can also add a mat to make a piece fit into a standard frame.
  - sithadmin 11y ago
    >The issue is that shipping prices are by weight, and the frames are usually much more heavy than a piece of canvas Which is precisely why I brought the canvas home in a tube. >Pro tip: get the artwork in a size that already fits a standard frame size and you'll save a ton of money. Eh. I looked at such options, but wasn't impressed. Ended up settling on a fairly oddball, incandescently red glossy frame. Goes well alongside the subjects (a bunch of PLA guys).
  - drited 11y ago
    As an aside, the custom framing business in the US is a high ROIC business with have regional economies of scale (implies local but not national scalability and hence sustainable competitive advantage) which is dominated by a company that was bought by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.
- ww520 11y ago
  Custom framing is expensive. Standard size frames are actually reasonably priced. What I ended up doing is to find a standard size frame first, then find the painting that fixes the frame. It's kind of backward but it works.
dshankar 11y ago
This was a fascinating read. Surprised that painters have seemingly good working conditions, set their own hours, and work from home! Just a random idea: when targeting mid-market customers, have you considered going "Watsi" style? Instead of an Instapainting storefront, what about commissioning artwork directly from painters? Display the painter's name, their photo, number of previous paintings painted, and their affordable price to commission a painting. Effectively, you could become the Internet-version of those studios themselves.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  I'd like to see an undercover investigation. This piece ended up being a little too close to propaganda.
  - chrischen 11y ago
    Well we visited both the factory style places as well as the small studios. We also talked to individual artists privately. I'm not sure what you're hoping for here.
    - wrongc0ntinent 11y ago
      How about: 1. turnover? 2. materials toxicity? 3. living conditions? 4. any way to enforce that what you see as fair practices stays that way once you scale way up?
      - chrischen 11y ago
        We're pretty small (painting 10,000 paintings per month is a solved problem, but we're not close to that volume), so we can't really enforce anything. We didn't really detect any unhappiness with any of the smaller studios (we didn't talk to workers in the factories). According to the studio heads, they usually recruited friends and ex-artist coworkers. Right now we only work with the smaller studios since we only do custom non-mass-produced work. I can however answer #2. Oil-based paints are in fact toxic, and known to the State of California to cause cancer. You will see the signs plastered in the oil paints aisle of Blick's and Utrecht stores. This is especially apparent when you consider the name of some colors like "Cadmium red." Most oil paints, if not all, contain lead as well.
Alex3917 11y ago
Seth Godin talks about Dafen in a bunch of his books. There is an entire section of the town that just makes monkey paintings. My favorite anecdote is about one of his monkey paintings that inexplicably has what looks like a teardrop on it. He said he was confused about this for a while, but then realized what must have happened -- some rain got on one of the paintings, and from then on everyone just kept copying the smudge. (Part of a larger riff about how not everyone who makes paintings or whatever is an artist.)
- imjk 11y ago
  I'd be interested in reading this. Can you point me to a specific book?
  - Alex3917 11y ago
    He talks about this in his book Linchpin, but he talks about it in a bunch of other places as well: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22seth+godin%22+dafen&oq=%22seth+godin%22+dafen&aqs=chrome..69i57.3625j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22seth+godin%22+dafen&oq=%2...
pnathan 11y ago
> And it likely played well with Western executives, who preferred to hear that their product was being mass produced in factories rather than subcontracted to rural artists. Absolutely fascinating! That's quite an interesting discussion point.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- chrischen 11y ago
  At least on Instapainting.com, 99% of people order their own photos of themselves, family, pets, etc. We almost never get reproduction orders, probably because reproductions can be mass-produced and be cheaper than something custom.
zeroecco 11y ago
And now I know why so many fine artists can't find work unless it is purely original work (a highly volatile market). I am saddened deeply that even art has degraded to this. if you want a print, buy a print from a printing machine. You want an oil painting? Hire or barter with a local artist to do so. I can't even. I just can't even.
- nkrisc 11y ago
  Aside from respecting geopolitical borders and nationalistic allegiance, why should I value a local artist any more than an artist in China? Is the Chinese artist somehow lesser than the local artist?
  - chrischen 11y ago
    Yep. Even The Simpsons outsources lower-level animation to South Korea.
  - zeroecco 11y ago
    is synthetic vanilla `less than` real vanilla? People are not the problem here, the product is. It lacks in the POINT of art. Art is like going to a concert, an expression of the human condition. Why go if you can listen to a perfect mix of it at home? How you get a painting is part of the reason you get the painting at all. The story behind it is just as much of the point as the piece itself. To be clear: If you are in China, buy art from a Chinese artist. If you are in Brazil, buy art from a Brazilian artist.
    - genericone 11y ago
      I think the downvotes are coming from the following interpretation of your comment: No true Artsman buys art internationally.
      - zeroecco 11y ago
        likely. but that wasn't my intent.
nugget 11y ago
Chris: I've seen at least half a dozen of these businesses come and go. None of them seem to be able to scale enough to make for an exciting long-term business worth reinvesting in. Despite individuals absolutely loving the final product. Any thoughts on why this is, and how you can succeed where others have failed?
- chrischen 11y ago
  We're completely bootstrapped, so we don't have unrealistic investor expectations or valuation targets to achieve or else implode. I think that's probably the primary reason most of these businesses disappear. They either invest a lot of money themselves or raise money from investors with the hope of making it back in profits that don't come (for whatever reason). I started Instapainting with a negative bank balance, so everything we've done has been optimized to increase revenue and efficiency.
  - nols 11y ago
    Why does your blog post say you're backed by YC if you're bootstrapped?
    - chrischen 11y ago
      We ran out of YC (and other investor's money), and pivoted to this to make money.
    - intrasight 11y ago
      clearly they were bootstrapped by YC
- JabavuAdams 11y ago
  Robots
eitally 11y ago
I've visited Dafen several times, had conversations with artists there, and purchased some paintings. The quality ranges from gradeschool-esque to fine art, even if most of it isn't original. I have no problems with factory-style creation of art, either. If people don't buy it, they won't create it. The vast majority goes to commercial properties looking for semi-generic-but-in-a-specific-style-or-color-scheme art for their public spaces or private rooms, and although it's blatantly obvious how crappy a hotel room painting is, it still beats staring at blank walls. These folks have found yet another way too bootstrap themselves out of poverty, and with startups like instapainting or https://www.nobilified.com/ https://www.nobilified.com/, it's easier than ever for them to have a global reach. Good for them! Good for us!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- frozenport 11y ago
  Here is the problem: why can't we have these guys painting actual art? A decade ago I was visiting the Dominican Republic and saw street vendors who sold touristy paintings that took them less than an hour to complete. Beach, sunset, palm. They weren't good but they were unique.
  - chrischen 11y ago
    We have both: People who paint photos as our main product, and people doing creative art: http://www.instapainting.com/artists http://www.instapainting.com/artists. But most people just go for turning a photo to a painting. It's simply where the market and demand is.
    - frozenport 11y ago
      That slightly different, what I didn't like was the following picture, filled with identical works: https://www.instapainting.com/blog/assets/factory.jpg https://www.instapainting.com/blog/assets/factory.jpg
dmritard96 11y ago
Been a few times. Very cool place with tons of artwork. The originals are hard to find but even the replications and copies are fascinating and watching people do it is very interesting.
cubano 11y ago
I'm somewhat surprised no one has of yet written an algo that can do this sort of thing on demand. Would it even matter it was automated if it did a good job? Are these artists is Dafen nothing but automatons, waiting to be replaced by some AI and a modded 3d plotter? Personally, I would not care how it was produced if I wanted such a painting.
- chrischen 11y ago
  We have been trying: https://www.instapainting.com/ai-painter https://www.instapainting.com/ai-painter https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robotic-painter-color/ https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robot... https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-painter/ https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-pa... Now the trick is to bridge the gap between the neural net algorithm and the physical robot. Unfortunately this photo to line drawing is the best we can do so far: https://twitter.com/instapainting/status/636245176554405892 https://twitter.com/instapainting/status/636245176554405892
- Houshalter 11y ago
  It exists!: https://vimeo.com/68859229 https://vimeo.com/68859229
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Nicholas_C 11y ago
In college my friend told me about this gig selling art that I took him up on. We picked up a moving truck from a warehouse and drove it to a city about 20 hours away and set up art sales in hotels. When I asked the owner of the operation where the paintings were from he said Asia. The paintings themselves appeared to be legitimate paintings. Most were different, but a few were very similar to other paintings packed into the truck. Often an object in the painting was moved slightly. Some even looked like classic paintings, I found one or two variations of Van Gogh's Starry Night, as mentioned in OP's article. Each one of these paintings sold for about $40-$100, depending on size. I made decent money for a college kid but I declined a second gig as I was concerned about where these paintings were coming from. I pictured a sweatshop like scenario with painters inhaling fumes while getting paid pennies for each painting. It's good to hear that probably isn't the case, at least according to this article. The paintings were also marketed as being painted by "starving artists" and the whole operation felt a little dishonest.
jbarham 11y ago
The only thing that Instapainting and similar businesses demonstrates is that bad photos don't make good paintings, especially when they're paint-by-numbers copies of bad photos. IMHO most of Instapainting's customers would be better off applying a "painterly" filter in Photoshop to their photos and have them printed to canvas at their nearest Costco. Paintings of photos look like paintings of photos because they're crippled by the artefacts of the source photo such as unnatural perspective (which is why the "normal" 50mm lens is a thing), inaccurate colours and clipped highlights due to the limited dynamic range of even pro-level DSLRs. Professional painters take years to hone their craft and learn the rules of composition that make a painting look good. E.g., one of my favourite painters is the watercolour virtuoso Joseph Zbukvic. Here's a video where he quickly paints an impressionistic Melbourne street scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81w9PBZOmZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81w9PBZOmZ8. Because he's not slavishly copying the photo he's free to rearrange the composition and add elements to make it more pleasing. He makes it look easy but that's because he's one of the best. Buying original paintings from professional artists doesn't have to be that expensive. This past weekend I attended a group art show opening in Melbourne and prices ranged from $450 to $2200 for some very nice original oil & watercolour paintings. If you can afford to live in the Bay area or most other large cities in the developed world, you can afford to occasionally pay that much for a painting. (Most of the stuff churned out by the "contemporary art" scene can be safely ignored. At the very high end contemporary art isn't art as much as it is an unregulated private currency for the very rich to launder and move around their wealth. Most contemporary art disappears without a trace.)
- chrischen 11y ago
  > Buying original paintings from professional artists doesn't have to be that expensive. This past weekend I attended a group art show opening in Melbourne and prices ranged from $450 to $2200 for some very nice original oil & watercolour paintings. Yep you're right. Our creative art section at http://www.instapainting.com http://www.instapainting.com feature artists from the Bay Area as well as New York, and their prices are actually even lower than the ones you listed. They're only a little bit more costly than market rate photo to painting.
- Animats 11y ago
known 11y ago
Exploitation?

252 points by chrischen 11y ago

I have a knockoff (or a 'copy', as some like to say) Yue Minjun piece from one of these places. Aside from a couple minor flaws, it's actually fairly high quality. Having it framed was about 13x more expensive than the painting itself.

chrischen 11y ago
The economics of framing are tricky too. Frames are actually just as cheap in China FOB price, especially if they are a mass-produced size. Even if not mass-produced, a frame from China would be priced in line with a custom painting. The issue is that shipping prices are by weight, and the frames are usually much more heavy than a piece of canvas. This significantly drives up the total price of a frame from China, and lets American framing companies charge much higher prices. Pro tip: get the artwork in a size that already fits a standard frame size and you'll save a ton of money.
- ben010783 11y ago
  To add to your tip about standard frame size, you can also add a mat to make a piece fit into a standard frame.
- sithadmin 11y ago
  >The issue is that shipping prices are by weight, and the frames are usually much more heavy than a piece of canvas Which is precisely why I brought the canvas home in a tube. >Pro tip: get the artwork in a size that already fits a standard frame size and you'll save a ton of money. Eh. I looked at such options, but wasn't impressed. Ended up settling on a fairly oddball, incandescently red glossy frame. Goes well alongside the subjects (a bunch of PLA guys).
- drited 11y ago
  As an aside, the custom framing business in the US is a high ROIC business with have regional economies of scale (implies local but not national scalability and hence sustainable competitive advantage) which is dominated by a company that was bought by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.
ww520 11y ago
Custom framing is expensive. Standard size frames are actually reasonably priced. What I ended up doing is to find a standard size frame first, then find the painting that fixes the frame. It's kind of backward but it works.

dshankar 11y ago

This was a fascinating read. Surprised that painters have seemingly good working conditions, set their own hours, and work from home! Just a random idea: when targeting mid-market customers, have you considered going "Watsi" style? Instead of an Instapainting storefront, what about commissioning artwork directly from painters? Display the painter's name, their photo, number of previous paintings painted, and their affordable price to commission a painting. Effectively, you could become the Internet-version of those studios themselves.

forrestthewoods 11y ago
I'd like to see an undercover investigation. This piece ended up being a little too close to propaganda.
- chrischen 11y ago
  Well we visited both the factory style places as well as the small studios. We also talked to individual artists privately. I'm not sure what you're hoping for here.
  - wrongc0ntinent 11y ago
    How about: 1. turnover? 2. materials toxicity? 3. living conditions? 4. any way to enforce that what you see as fair practices stays that way once you scale way up?
    - chrischen 11y ago
      We're pretty small (painting 10,000 paintings per month is a solved problem, but we're not close to that volume), so we can't really enforce anything. We didn't really detect any unhappiness with any of the smaller studios (we didn't talk to workers in the factories). According to the studio heads, they usually recruited friends and ex-artist coworkers. Right now we only work with the smaller studios since we only do custom non-mass-produced work. I can however answer #2. Oil-based paints are in fact toxic, and known to the State of California to cause cancer. You will see the signs plastered in the oil paints aisle of Blick's and Utrecht stores. This is especially apparent when you consider the name of some colors like "Cadmium red." Most oil paints, if not all, contain lead as well.

Alex3917 11y ago

Seth Godin talks about Dafen in a bunch of his books. There is an entire section of the town that just makes monkey paintings. My favorite anecdote is about one of his monkey paintings that inexplicably has what looks like a teardrop on it. He said he was confused about this for a while, but then realized what must have happened -- some rain got on one of the paintings, and from then on everyone just kept copying the smudge. (Part of a larger riff about how not everyone who makes paintings or whatever is an artist.)

imjk 11y ago
I'd be interested in reading this. Can you point me to a specific book?
- Alex3917 11y ago
  He talks about this in his book Linchpin, but he talks about it in a bunch of other places as well: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22seth+godin%22+dafen&oq=%22seth+godin%22+dafen&aqs=chrome..69i57.3625j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22seth+godin%22+dafen&oq=%2...

pnathan 11y ago

> And it likely played well with Western executives, who preferred to hear that their product was being mass produced in factories rather than subcontracted to rural artists. Absolutely fascinating! That's quite an interesting discussion point.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

chrischen 11y ago
At least on Instapainting.com, 99% of people order their own photos of themselves, family, pets, etc. We almost never get reproduction orders, probably because reproductions can be mass-produced and be cheaper than something custom.

zeroecco 11y ago

And now I know why so many fine artists can't find work unless it is purely original work (a highly volatile market). I am saddened deeply that even art has degraded to this. if you want a print, buy a print from a printing machine. You want an oil painting? Hire or barter with a local artist to do so. I can't even. I just can't even.

nkrisc 11y ago
Aside from respecting geopolitical borders and nationalistic allegiance, why should I value a local artist any more than an artist in China? Is the Chinese artist somehow lesser than the local artist?
- chrischen 11y ago
  Yep. Even The Simpsons outsources lower-level animation to South Korea.
- zeroecco 11y ago
  is synthetic vanilla `less than` real vanilla? People are not the problem here, the product is. It lacks in the POINT of art. Art is like going to a concert, an expression of the human condition. Why go if you can listen to a perfect mix of it at home? How you get a painting is part of the reason you get the painting at all. The story behind it is just as much of the point as the piece itself. To be clear: If you are in China, buy art from a Chinese artist. If you are in Brazil, buy art from a Brazilian artist.
  - genericone 11y ago
    I think the downvotes are coming from the following interpretation of your comment: No true Artsman buys art internationally.
    - zeroecco 11y ago
      likely. but that wasn't my intent.

nugget 11y ago

Chris: I've seen at least half a dozen of these businesses come and go. None of them seem to be able to scale enough to make for an exciting long-term business worth reinvesting in. Despite individuals absolutely loving the final product. Any thoughts on why this is, and how you can succeed where others have failed?

chrischen 11y ago
We're completely bootstrapped, so we don't have unrealistic investor expectations or valuation targets to achieve or else implode. I think that's probably the primary reason most of these businesses disappear. They either invest a lot of money themselves or raise money from investors with the hope of making it back in profits that don't come (for whatever reason). I started Instapainting with a negative bank balance, so everything we've done has been optimized to increase revenue and efficiency.
- nols 11y ago
  Why does your blog post say you're backed by YC if you're bootstrapped?
  - chrischen 11y ago
    We ran out of YC (and other investor's money), and pivoted to this to make money.
  - intrasight 11y ago
    clearly they were bootstrapped by YC
JabavuAdams 11y ago
Robots

eitally 11y ago

I've visited Dafen several times, had conversations with artists there, and purchased some paintings. The quality ranges from gradeschool-esque to fine art, even if most of it isn't original. I have no problems with factory-style creation of art, either. If people don't buy it, they won't create it. The vast majority goes to commercial properties looking for semi-generic-but-in-a-specific-style-or-color-scheme art for their public spaces or private rooms, and although it's blatantly obvious how crappy a hotel room painting is, it still beats staring at blank walls. These folks have found yet another way too bootstrap themselves out of poverty, and with startups like instapainting or https://www.nobilified.com/ https://www.nobilified.com/, it's easier than ever for them to have a global reach. Good for them! Good for us!

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
frozenport 11y ago
Here is the problem: why can't we have these guys painting actual art? A decade ago I was visiting the Dominican Republic and saw street vendors who sold touristy paintings that took them less than an hour to complete. Beach, sunset, palm. They weren't good but they were unique.
- chrischen 11y ago
  We have both: People who paint photos as our main product, and people doing creative art: http://www.instapainting.com/artists http://www.instapainting.com/artists. But most people just go for turning a photo to a painting. It's simply where the market and demand is.
  - frozenport 11y ago
    That slightly different, what I didn't like was the following picture, filled with identical works: https://www.instapainting.com/blog/assets/factory.jpg https://www.instapainting.com/blog/assets/factory.jpg

dmritard96 11y ago

Been a few times. Very cool place with tons of artwork. The originals are hard to find but even the replications and copies are fascinating and watching people do it is very interesting.

cubano 11y ago

I'm somewhat surprised no one has of yet written an algo that can do this sort of thing on demand. Would it even matter it was automated if it did a good job? Are these artists is Dafen nothing but automatons, waiting to be replaced by some AI and a modded 3d plotter? Personally, I would not care how it was produced if I wanted such a painting.

chrischen 11y ago
We have been trying: https://www.instapainting.com/ai-painter https://www.instapainting.com/ai-painter https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robotic-painter-color/ https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robot... https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-painter/ https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-pa... Now the trick is to bridge the gap between the neural net algorithm and the physical robot. Unfortunately this photo to line drawing is the best we can do so far: https://twitter.com/instapainting/status/636245176554405892 https://twitter.com/instapainting/status/636245176554405892
Houshalter 11y ago
It exists!: https://vimeo.com/68859229 https://vimeo.com/68859229

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Nicholas_C 11y ago

In college my friend told me about this gig selling art that I took him up on. We picked up a moving truck from a warehouse and drove it to a city about 20 hours away and set up art sales in hotels. When I asked the owner of the operation where the paintings were from he said Asia. The paintings themselves appeared to be legitimate paintings. Most were different, but a few were very similar to other paintings packed into the truck. Often an object in the painting was moved slightly. Some even looked like classic paintings, I found one or two variations of Van Gogh's Starry Night, as mentioned in OP's article. Each one of these paintings sold for about $40-$100, depending on size. I made decent money for a college kid but I declined a second gig as I was concerned about where these paintings were coming from. I pictured a sweatshop like scenario with painters inhaling fumes while getting paid pennies for each painting. It's good to hear that probably isn't the case, at least according to this article. The paintings were also marketed as being painted by "starving artists" and the whole operation felt a little dishonest.

jbarham 11y ago

The only thing that Instapainting and similar businesses demonstrates is that bad photos don't make good paintings, especially when they're paint-by-numbers copies of bad photos. IMHO most of Instapainting's customers would be better off applying a "painterly" filter in Photoshop to their photos and have them printed to canvas at their nearest Costco. Paintings of photos look like paintings of photos because they're crippled by the artefacts of the source photo such as unnatural perspective (which is why the "normal" 50mm lens is a thing), inaccurate colours and clipped highlights due to the limited dynamic range of even pro-level DSLRs. Professional painters take years to hone their craft and learn the rules of composition that make a painting look good. E.g., one of my favourite painters is the watercolour virtuoso Joseph Zbukvic. Here's a video where he quickly paints an impressionistic Melbourne street scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81w9PBZOmZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81w9PBZOmZ8. Because he's not slavishly copying the photo he's free to rearrange the composition and add elements to make it more pleasing. He makes it look easy but that's because he's one of the best. Buying original paintings from professional artists doesn't have to be that expensive. This past weekend I attended a group art show opening in Melbourne and prices ranged from $450 to $2200 for some very nice original oil & watercolour paintings. If you can afford to live in the Bay area or most other large cities in the developed world, you can afford to occasionally pay that much for a painting. (Most of the stuff churned out by the "contemporary art" scene can be safely ignored. At the very high end contemporary art isn't art as much as it is an unregulated private currency for the very rich to launder and move around their wealth. Most contemporary art disappears without a trace.)

chrischen 11y ago
> Buying original paintings from professional artists doesn't have to be that expensive. This past weekend I attended a group art show opening in Melbourne and prices ranged from $450 to $2200 for some very nice original oil & watercolour paintings. Yep you're right. Our creative art section at http://www.instapainting.com http://www.instapainting.com feature artists from the Bay Area as well as New York, and their prices are actually even lower than the ones you listed. They're only a little bit more costly than market rate photo to painting.
Animats 11y ago

known 11y ago

Exploitation?