Dafen oil painting Village
Making a Living on Canvas: Reproduction, Creation, and Survival in Dafen
Zhao Fenggang’s day usually starts at noon. After a quick wash and a bite to eat, he settles into the living room, where easels crowd every corner. Some days, inspiration doesn’t come at all, and by night he may have painted only a few strokes. But when the “feeling” arrives, he can keep going until dawn the next day.
Back in 1989, a Hong Kong art dealer named Huang Jiang came to a small village in Shenzhen, Guangdong, called Dafen. He saw two advantages there: low costs and its close proximity to Hong Kong. He brought people in to copy oil paintings, then shipped them overseas. That was how the Dafen oil-painting industry first took shape.
Thirty-six years later, Dafen has become the largest oil-painting production and trading base in China. People now instinctively call it “Dafen Oil Painting Village.” Today, it holds thousands of galleries and art studios, with more than 8,000 people working in related fields. Zhao Fenggang is one of them.
In Dafen, the meaning of the word “painting” has never stopped evolving. The entire chain around painting—upstream and downstream—has kept stretching outward. If you’re willing, you can always find a place for yourself somewhere in that chain.
Dafen isn’t large, but when it comes to the question of “how to make a living by painting,” it can hold hundreds, even thousands, of different answers.
The more you paint, the more you earn
Even now, twenty years later, Zhao Fenggang still remembers his first time walking into Dafen with a sense of surprise. “Before that,” he says, “I never imagined painting could be a way to survive.”
He didn’t finish high school. At a young age, he left his hometown in Gansu and headed south, doing whatever work he could find—construction sites, factory lines, anything. When he first arrived in Shenzhen in 2004, he was only eighteen.
One day, while searching for jobs on the street, a recruitment notice caught his eye. It had been pasted upside down, but the words were clear: “Painters wanted. Basic skills preferred.” Following the address, he found a studio in Dafen. “Just try,” the boss said, handing him a reference image to copy.
Zhao had liked drawing since childhood and had learned watercolor and gouache in school clubs, but he had never touched oil paint before. Still, he copied the sample stroke by stroke. The boss nodded. “Not bad for a beginner.” He was hired on the spot—earning less than 1,000 yuan a month, roughly the same as factory workers nearby.
By then, after more than a decade of growth, Dafen had entered its era of mass “order paintings.” Whatever image a client brought, painters reproduced it. Whatever quantity a client wanted, painters delivered. Landscapes, portraits, famous masterpieces, ordinary photos—someone in Dafen could paint it. Besides small street studios, there were also large painting factories where hundreds of painters worked like a production line, filling orders together.
Once Zhao got familiar with materials and techniques, he improved fast. Within a month, he could finish most orders on his own. After three months, he moved to a piece-rate studio. “Back then,” he recalls, “one painting could earn about 30 yuan. The more you painted, the more you made.”
That same year, Dafen became the only sub-venue of Shenzhen’s first International Cultural Industries Fair. The village’s model drew national attention, orders poured in, and the industry hit its peak.
Painter Lin Jianhong from Guangxi remembers that peak vividly. He arrived in Dafen in early 2008 and joined a factory with nearly 500 employees. With endless repeated orders, painters didn’t work “one by one,” but “row by row.” A line of canvases would be set up: sketch all of them first, then base color, then midtones, then detailing. Using that system, Lin could complete almost thirty one-meter-square paintings a day.
They had their tricks too. For example, mix a large batch of paint before starting, because matching the exact same color twice is nearly impossible. If a canvas showed color differences, it meant extra time fixing and repainting.
During rush seasons, painters barely went home. They slept on packing boxes beside their easels, then woke up and kept painting. Even with machines roaring for cutting, laminating, and framing, they could fall asleep anywhere.
“But not long after I arrived,” Lin says, “that scene slowly disappeared. Now you don’t see it at all.”
What you can paint vs. what you want to paint
At first, Lin earned about 6,000 yuan a month, while veteran painters around him made over 10,000. That was good money even for Shenzhen.
But the boom didn’t last. The 2008 global financial crisis hit, export orders collapsed, and by the end of that year Lin’s factory had almost no work left. He quit, rented an apartment with other painters, and began to find clients on his own.
In those days, the painter’s rented home doors stayed open in daytime—partly to clear the smell of paints, partly because they waited for people to walk through the village “dropping off orders.”
One of Lin’s earliest steady clients was an online seller who walked into his living room holding a photo and asked, “Can you paint this?”
It was a typical “Nine Koi Fish” prosperity picture. “Yes,” Lin answered.
At the time, popular domestic sellers were prosperity-themed images—peonies, money trees, golden mountains. Smartphone references weren’t common yet; most painters worked from printed photographs.
And it wasn’t as simple as it looked. Lin later asked an art-academy graduate friend to copy a normal landscape photo, and the friend couldn’t achieve the texture at all. “To paint it well,” Lin explained, “you need to build relief with modeling paste first, then do base and layered brushing.” Years of factory copying had pushed Dafen painters to develop a whole set of practical techniques—often using tools beyond brushes. “People without that training,” he said, “even professionals, often can’t match the effect.”
Painter Yang Fuxu, also from Guangxi but academically trained, arrived in Dafen in 1999 and focused on watercolor reproductions, which were less common and more demanding. For nearly two years, he lived on a reversed schedule—sleeping by day, painting by night. His skills sharpened through constant copying, but the repetition gradually exhausted him. “Order paintings may look easy,” he said, “but high-precision copying is tiring, and it leaves almost no room for personal expression.”
Unwilling to keep “painting for someone else’s demands,” Yang left his studio in 2001 and became one of the earliest painters in Dafen to explore original work.
Zeng Qingjin from Henan had also painted order works for ten years. In 2013 he stopped taking orders completely and devoted himself to original painting. Zeng Guifu from Fujian had been an original painter before coming to Dafen. He remembers buying canvases and paints before even thinking about meals. “I don’t know how many bowls of noodles I lived on,” he said. But passion alone was never enough to become a full-time original artist.
Eating to live, painting to speak
Recently, Zhao’s apartment is still filled with unfinished canvases. One shows children walking forward in warm tones, but one child looks back with a devil’s face. Inspired by a bullying news story, Zhao is working on a series about human nature. Around those canvases lie stacks of paid orders. “I use copying to support my originals,” he says—“painting to feed painting.”
After the financial crisis, overseas orders recovered slowly. Guided by local government policy, Dafen began a transition, supporting original art more strongly. The new direction pushed many long-time order painters toward a crossroads. “Whether to do original work isn’t just a choice,” Zhao says. “It’s a matter of survival.”
Once Zeng Qingjin stepped out of the order-painting system, he lost stable income. If his originals didn’t sell for a long time, his family’s finances collapsed. He and his wife sometimes had to borrow money to get by.
Zhao once rented a small shop in Dafen in 2015 to sell his own work. “Business was miserable,” he laughed bitterly. After years of copying, when painters tried to express themselves, the market didn’t respond the way it did to orders.
Yang Fuxu went through something similar. In 2007 he paid his own way to study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He absorbed exhibitions, conversations, ideas, and returned to Dafen with a new environmental series using migrating fish as metaphor. Yet for years, no buyers came.
Even selling a work doesn’t guarantee stability. In 2016 Zeng Qingjin made a massive collage-like piece from torn cloth, two meters high and 5.4 meters long, and sold it for a high price. “I thought I had made it,” he said, but afterward his works still didn’t sell easily. “The art market is too uncertain.”
When you’re free from customer demands, a different problem appears: what should you paint? Freedom can feel like opening a blind box—every work’s fate is uncertain. One year Zhao finished only two paintings. He had ideas and emotion, but every revision felt “not quite right.”
His gallery couldn’t survive. He returned to orders for steady income, while keeping a small space for originals. “You have to stay alive first,” he says, “before you can keep speaking through your art.”
Yang refused to go back. After his earlier series failed, he painted some more market-friendly originals while continuing to develop his own language. Years later, he created the “Dancers” series based on tree forms. This time, the market nodded. The works entered exhibitions and sold well. More importantly, his style gained recognition—and the once-ignored fish series eventually found buyers too.
Today, Dafen has over 400 original artists. In the past five years nearly 200 works by Dafen painters have been selected for national or provincial exhibitions.
Beyond the canvas
In 2012, when Zeng Guifu first moved from Xiamen to Shenzhen, he searched online: “Where are the richest people in Shenzhen?” By then he had stopped making original art. “When the noodles were gone and my paintings still didn’t sell,” he said, “I knew I had to change my path.”
He turned out to be luckier in business. Back in Xiamen he had run a mural studio with friends. After arriving in Shenzhen, he read about “participation” as a concept. With social media exploding, he noticed that more people wanted to share their experiences online. “Could painting become something everyone participates in?” he asked himself.
In 2014 he opened Dafen’s first oil-painting experience shop. At first the idea was too new. Some customers hesitated at the door when they heard they had to pay to try. Others sat by the easel afraid to ruin the canvas. Zeng encouraged them, saying oil paint can always be corrected, and demonstrated the steps over and over.
In 2017, during the Shenzhen Cultural Expo, he was invited to set up a booth at a creative market. Unexpectedly, his booth became the most popular one. People queued just to paint for themselves. After that, business took off. The shop expanded into many art services and events. Soon, “painting experience” signs began popping up throughout Dafen—the industry reaching ordinary people in a new way.
In Dafen, “making a living by painting” had long gone beyond the canvas. In 2014, Lin Jianhong got a job painting scenery for a theme park. The standards were strict; every color had to match the color card perfectly. Many academy students had to redo their work. Lin, who had copied thousands of paintings, had developed razor-sharp color sensitivity. He could mix quickly and accurately, impressing even professional supervisors.
Later he joined another large park project, aging a giant antique ship. With Dafen order-painting techniques, he and his partners added rust, water stains, decay, wood grain, and corroded textures until the illusion looked real. “It was still order painting,” Lin said—only this time, the “canvas” was an entire space.
Because the results were so convincing, the team won more projects. A job planned for three months extended to four years.
After nearly twenty years in Dafen, Lin has never fully left the order-painting system. But he believes the system has changed. “Rather than ‘order painting,’ it’s become ‘custom painting,’” he says. Demand still exists, but expectations are different. Good painters are no longer mechanical repeaters; they must keep improving, giving real value even to reproductions.
Holding together, growing together
Near the entrance of Dafen stands a striking building housing TNT International Art Space. Zeng Qingjin now rents a studio there.
In 2018, Feng Jianmei—who had long run a framing factory—founded TNT International Art Space. Her goal was to break the stereotype that Dafen only produces copied works, and to create a platform for original artists. But once the project started, she realized artists needed more than a gallery.
Creation is only one link in the chain. Many original painters in Dafen used to work alone. Besides painting, they had to find buyers, negotiate prices, and chase sales. Without stable income, some returned to orders, breaking their creative continuity. Their energy drained, their works sold for less, and a vicious cycle formed.
Across from TNT, the T5 Contemporary Art Center opened in 2024, founded by Long Jingchuang, head of the Dafen Fine Art Industry Association. He has painted orders, originals, run studios, and built decorative-art businesses since arriving in 1996. In his view, the road of originality is hard. Few can walk it through alone. For Dafen to become a true center for original art, “group survival” is necessary.
Since opening, T5 has signed more than fifty artists, most of them local Dafen painters, and promotes their works through exhibitions and academic exchange.
At TNT, Feng Jianmei launched an artist-in-residence program: free studio space, plus exhibition planning, sales channels, and copyright management. “The idea is to remove their worries,” she says, “so they can focus solely on creation.”
Zeng Qingjin was one of the first to join. With TNT’s support, he regained a stability he hadn’t felt in years. “Just like when I took orders long ago,” he says, “I only need to paint—except now I paint my own work.”
The effect showed quickly. After nearly seven years in the program, his style matured, and he produced more complete, systematic bodies of work than ever before. With professional management behind him, “selling paintings no longer depends on luck or coincidence.”
Not far from TNT stands an old, weathered sign reading: “World Oil Paintings · China Dafen.” Since he began order painting in 2003, Zeng Qingjin has lost count of how many reproductions and originals have traveled from Dafen to every corner of China and beyond. Recently, he has a new idea: to return to his hometown in Henan for a while, seek fresh inspiration there, then bring the new works back to Dafen for exhibition and sale.
If he succeeds, perhaps the words “China Dafen” will gain yet another meaning.
