True Love and True Art in China’s Model Bohemia
Still from Hua zhi yuan, twenty-episode television drama, Guangdong Television Station, 2008.
Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, China, is the world’s largest production center for handmade paintings, housing 8000 migrant workers who paint 5 million oil paintings a year. In 2004, Dafen village was named by China’s Ministry of Culture as a National Model Cultural Industry. Attendant with this honor, Chinese officials made Dafen village the subject of extensive propaganda spanning television to the World Expo. This paper examines two televisual propaganda constructions of this model bohemia and the inscription of Dafen’s women artists and bosses into a new narrative of gendered urban creativity. It examines how the local Chinese party-state imagines the transformation of its migrant workers into global creative workers, and why it exhorts them to “paint whatever you want to paint, love whomever you want to love.”
