
Inside The Fine Art Factories of China - chrischen
https://instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to-paint-10000-paintings/
======
eitally
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!

~~~
frozenport
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.

~~~
bootload
_" Here is the problem: why can't we have these guys painting actual art?"_

Ever created visual art? Most art you see is commercial art. Capital-A, Art is
personal. To create an original piece of art takes a lot of effort, be it
something visually inspiring, a novel concept or deeply felt emotion. Apply
some technique and maybe you might come up with something good, maybe?

 _" En plein air"_ isn't always practical.

Think of a photographs used in the way you describe, as the _" Cheeze-Wiz"_ of
inspiration for commercial art.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I don't know. Isn't that backwards? "If its easy, its not real" is too simple.

Art may be defined by the artists' effort, or by the effect is has. Plenty of
folks are impressed/astounded by 'street art'. Why is it not real, just
because the artist had the chops to make it look easy?

~~~
bootload
_" Isn't that backwards? "If its easy, its not real" is too simple."_

good point @Joe, what I'm trying to explain is, it's inspiration that's hard.
The Muse. Art that comes easily, rarely looks/feels bad.

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dshankar
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
I'd like to see an undercover investigation. This piece ended up being a
little too close to propaganda.

~~~
analyst74
Decent working conditions, flexible hours, desirable job, in China?! That's
blasphemy!

Well, the desirable job part might be stretching it...more like shitty job in
a highly respected profession.

~~~
chrischen
That's true, the artists that do the photo to painting aren't necessarily
ecstatic about signing their names on it.

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Alex3917
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
I'd be interested in reading this. Can you point me to a specific book?

~~~
Alex3917
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=%2...](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)

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Nicholas_C
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.

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jbarham
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.)

~~~
Animats
_" 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."_

That works quite well, especially if you use one of the better inkjet printers
with six or seven inks, print on canvas, and finish off with a sprayed clear
coat. This is called "Giclée".[1]

There's already an online service for this.[2] You can even see what the
result will look like before you order. Price is about $30-$50/square foot.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée)
[2] [http://www.canvaspress.com/](http://www.canvaspress.com/)

~~~
chrischen
Yea, we offer high quality archival canvas prints printed on demand through
our sister site: [http://www.amanufactory.com](http://www.amanufactory.com)

There isn't just _an online service_ for this, there are literally thousands.

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nugget
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
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
Why does your blog post say you're backed by YC if you're bootstrapped?

~~~
chrischen
We ran out of YC (and other investor's money), and pivoted to this to make
money.

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pnathan
> 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.

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cubano
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
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/robot...](https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robotic-
painter-color/)

[https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-
pa...](https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-painter/)

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)

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sithadmin
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
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.

~~~
sithadmin
>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).

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dmritard96
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.

------
known
Exploitation?

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zeroecco
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
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?

~~~
zeroecco
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
I think the downvotes are coming from the following interpretation of your
comment: No true Artsman buys art internationally.

~~~
zeroecco
likely. but that wasn't my intent.

