Dafen was once a sleepy rural village on the periphery of Shenzhen. Then, in 1989, enterprising Hong Kong businessman Huang Jiang launched an oil-painting ‘factory’, starting his venture with twenty labourers who were taught to copy canonical Western paintings. Today, Dafen has a population of more than 10,000 people, most of whom are rural migrants turned oil painters. In crammed studios and narrow alleyways, Dafen’s painters turn out thousands of reproductions of celebrated European paintings for the foreign market. To meet their deadlines, the painters sleep on the floor between clotheslines strung with masterpieces. In 2015, the annual turnover in painting sales was estimated at over USD 65 million.

In China’s Van Goghs, the father-daughter director team of Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu tell the story of one of these painters, Xiaoyong Zhao, who moved to Dafen from Hunan in 1996. Since then, Zhao and his family have painted more than 100,000 replicas of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, producing meticulous copies for a mere pittance, all the while stifling their own creative instincts. Still, after all these years, Zhao feels a deep affinity with the Dutch painter, identifying most strongly with his struggles to balance a life of creative expression with economic survival. Eventually, Zhao fulfils his lifelong dream to travel to Amsterdam to see van Gogh’s original paintings. In Europe, he experiences an epiphany, as well as heartbreak.

China’s Van Goghs is an intimate and affecting documentary that explores how a tremendously skilled painter pursues his life dream, while also reflecting on the challenges and struggles facing millions of workers in a rapidly changing contemporary China.

The screening on 11 November will be followed by a post-screening talk by co-director Haibo Yu. The talk will be moderated by M+ Visual Art Assistant Curator Ariadne Long in Mandarin.

Haibo Yu is a Chinese filmmaker and photographer. He is the director of the Shenzhen Professional Photographers Association and the Chief Photo Editor of Shenzhen Economic Daily. His most prominent photo series China Dafen Oil Painting Village (2005) won the 49th World Press Photography Contest in 2006 and has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum. He has published a book Living in China’s Shenzhen (2007) and released a photo-essay film One Man’s Shenzhen (2012).

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a documentary producer, director, and film scholar who is currently senior lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her work is committed to advancing de-westernised film theories and research-led practice. Her books include ‘My’ Self on Camera (2019) and China’s iGeneration (2014). Besides China’s Van Goghs, Kiki also produced the feature documentary The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019).