"So when the chance came, he went to China—not as a true believer like his friends, perhaps, but certainly as a fellow traveler, in the strictest sense. And when the group came back, it took a while for the effects fully to register. The revolutionary engagement would give way in time, replaced by explorations of the sacred, the feminine, and the unconscious. (Not that these had ever been wholly absent: As Eric Hayot's fine study Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel [University of Michigan Press, 2004] reconstructs, a whole series of aesthetic and libidinal fascinations were at play in avant-garde versions of chinoiserie.)
It is worth remembering that Barthes was among the first to express disappointment in the trip to China, in a short essay published just after the group's return. He was polite about it, but it had bored him silly. He and his friends had gone to China to "shake the tree of knowledge," he wrote, "hoping the answer [would] fall to the ground and we [would] be able to return home bringing back with us our chief intellectual nourishment: a secret deciphered." No such luck. In People's China, the signifier was not in ecstatic excess of the signified, after all. "We leave behind us then the turbulence of symbols" and end up in "a vast land . . . where meaning is discrete to the point of being rare.
"As for the body," he wrote, it was obliterated by "the uniformity of the clothing, the prosaic gestures . . . the dense crowds." It was impossible to escape the "extraordinary impression—perhaps a heartrending one—that the body no longer has to be understood, that here it stubbornly resists signifying, refusing to allow itself to be caught up in any reading, erotic or dramatic (except on the stage)." And how many Maoist "model operas" did you really want to attend, anyway? It was an aesthete's hell."
'About Chinese copy':
The Chinese Internet: Why the “Copy Cats” Win
by Sarah Lacy on October 28, 2009
At first blush, it seems like Song Li is one of those stereotypical Chinese Web entrepreneurs. The kind who rips off successful US sites and hopes operating in the world’s largest consumer Internet market will magically create a successful company. After all, he made a good bit of money investing in ChinaHR—a job board site that sold to Monster.com for more than $200 million over two deals – and right now he operates Digu.com, a Twitter-clone, and Zhenai.com an online dating site that could be the Chinese Match.com.
But if you dig a little deeper into that dating site, you start to understand how differently Li thinks, and how that thinking reflects an aspect of Chinese consumer Web sites that Westerners frequently miss. Where Chinese Web entrepreneurs shine is in taking an existing business idea – ripping it off, if you like – but then completely rethinking and reinventing that idea’s business model and process. This not only makes the companies more profitable faster, it’s a big reason why home-grown Chinese versions continually beat US companies trying to expand into China.
To a Valley entrepreneur taking someone else’s idea, improving on it and taking all the credit may seem unfair or even unethical. But Google didn’t come up with the search engine and Facebook didn’t come up with a social network. What mattered was execution. Put another way: Sure the Chinese can learn a thing or two about original Web ideas from the Valley, but the Web 2.0 generation can learn a lot about monetization from China.
So what does a Chinese Match.com look like? In Li’s own words, it’s very “practical.” China has a long history of matchmaking so just going online, finding someone you like and messaging them isn’t going to appeal to a lot of the population. The ones who are comfortable with doing that will just use social networks. For those who aren’t, there are already an established off-line alternative in some 200,000 very local, fragmented companies that specialize in matchmaking, charging anywhere between 2,000 and 60,000 RMB per six months—depending on the service. Even in comparatively cheap China, they’ve got pretty high customer acquisition costs thanks to all that brick and mortar and heavy placement of classified ads to keep bringing in new singles.
That’s where the Web should come in, but it’s a bit trickier than that. Here’s the rub in China: The entire consumer Internet—along with “old world” industries like consumer packaged goods and entertainment—are all growing and developing at in parallel. In the US, you could argue social networks are the Web 2.0 answer to the Web 1.0 online dating sites. But how do you build a profitable online dating company in a world where a million MySpace and Facebook rip-offs already exist?
Li has struck an interesting middle ground: A Web site that’s free to join and free to search, with revenues provided by a 350-person strong call center of real-life matchmakers. Once you find someone on the site you like you place a call to a matchmaker to be set up on a date. Using the service costs 3,000 RMB (roughly $430 in dollars) for a six-month subscription—about the low-end of a traditional matchmaking service – and at least one person going on the date has to be a paid subscriber. The matchmaker determines whether both people want to go on the dates, or suggests an alternative date from amongst the site’s 22 million registered members (growing by 40,000 per day). The matchmaker then sets up the date, and then follows up afterwards.
The matchmaker isn’t your friend—she is doing a job. If you suggest someone out of your league, they might, ahem, guide your expectations. “We just want you to be realistic,” Li says. And in the event of a rejection, Li’s team asks a detailed questionnaire to determine exactly why one party didn’t want a second date. And then they call the other party to explain – in precise detail – where they went wrong. “At least you know why and there are certain things you can fix next time,” he says. It may sound brutal but it gives the service clear value. Zhenai.com is profitable, generating about $2 million in revenues per month, growing at double-digit rates month-over-month.
It may also sound like labor-powered, innovation-free China, but it’s not. Li has built a specific CRM system from scratch to walk matchmakers through the matching process and he’s hired a psychologist to help train them on what questions to ask, and what to say to the lovelorn. Li himself has a PHD in finance from Cornell, where he also studied evolutionary biology and molecular genetics.
And then there’s the statistics. Not even Max Levchin—the PayPal and Slide founder who has graphed everything down to his past girlfriends’ bra sizes over time— could match Li’s love for charts and stats. All those brutally honest conversations about why dates succeeded or failed have turned into a trove of statistical data that matchmakers turn into pre-date advice.
A random example? 60% of women with long, straight hair get second dates—even when the data is normalized for Chinese women being more likely to have long, straight hair. The worst group? Short curly hair, which has only a 5% second-date percentage. (Note to self: Good thing I’m married.) “We’re not telling them what to do, we’re just giving them information,” Li says matter-of-factly. Men also like black pantyhose and shiny color-less nail polish. (Li blushes a bit when he tells me about the pantyhose.)
Li has also found that men are universally attracted to women with a .7 hip-to-waist ratio—something he believes is genetically hard-coded as a reproductive trait. “I can’t do anything if a woman is fat, but I can tell her to dress so it shows off her waist,” he says dispassionately. It works both ways, by the way. Women prefer dates wear a suit and because women are predisposed to look for “good providers” Li says he can track for every extra 1,000 RMB you make a month, statistically what percentage more attractive you will be to an average woman. “It’s a math fact,” he says. “I can build you a model.”
It bears noting that Li is not some fratty chauvinist pig. He’s a brainy, bespectacled former derivatives trading executive on Wall Street and Hong Kong, and, yes, he is married. He just likes to break things down into numbers and trends in an obsessive attempt to quantify the seemingly qualitative behavioral patterns of it all. And that makes him the exact opposite of any US consumer site trying to blindly “localize” a site for the Chinese market by just changing the language.
Van Gogh From the Sweatshop
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html
By Martin Paetsch in Shenzhen
Southern China is the world's leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day.
A giant hand raises an impressive paintbrush into the sky at the entrance to the art village. The bronze sculpture outside the gates of Dafen in southern China leaves no visitor in doubt as to what the people do here. The "village" is in fact a modern suburb of Shenzhen, a city with 10 million inhabitants northeast of Hong Kong, and it has achieved unexpected fame and relative prosperity. But the city's ostentatiously advertized success has little to do with creativity: It's based on the reproduction of famous artworks on an industrial scale.
In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world's cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen's four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth €28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container.
Huang Jiang remembers the time when Dafen was really just a village. He came here as the first art-producing entrepreneur 17 years ago. He worked as an errand boy in Hong Kong before he started copying famous art works. Then he crossed the border into China, resolved to open up the first workshop in what was then still a no-man's land. Wages and rent were low, and the port of Hong Kong was close by. "When I arrived in 1989, there was nothing here besides dirt roads and bamboo," the now 60-year-old businessman remembers. "It was like Siberia for factory owners."
Huang has three identical, gold-colored busts of himself standing in his office. They remind him of better days -- the 1990s, when his business was at the peak of its development. Once he produced 50,000 paintings in a month and a half for Wal-Mart, the US retail giant. He earned as much as €200,000 a year ($256,000) -- a fortune in China. Today the roughly 40 painters he employs earn him only five-digit sums.
The smile displayed by Huang's golden likeness no longer graces his own face. He seems tired. The competition is getting to him. His former apprentices have opened up their own workshops all over the neighborhood. Huang's idea turned out to be as easy to copy as an oil painting. "During the first few years, I was the only one in the business," he complains. "Everything was easier then, but the competition has gotten tough now."
The McDonalds of the Art World
The others are selling more paintings at lower prices -- like Huang's former pupil Wu Ruiqiu. His business "Shenzhen Artlover" ships 300,000 paintings a year and is one of Dafen's model companies. The businessman is dreaming of industrial mass production, complete with assembly lines. The creation of every painting would be divided into standardized production stages. Ruiqiu wants to "get into the business of oil paintings the way McDonalds got into the business of fast food." By the end of the year, he wants to have set up an art school for training talented new painters -- even if mass production doesn't require all that much talent.
AP
Painters compete during a facsimile match in Dafen Village. More than 110 contestants make facsimile of portrait or scenery oil painting in the timed match.
The Chinese government is proud of Dafen: It considers the art village an "important cultural industry," Huang says. The most recent product of the artsy economic miracle stands on the opposite side of the main street -- the town is running out of space. It's a replica of Michelangelo's David, flanked by flowerpots in front of the new "Dafen Louvre." The walls of the staircase are decorated with ancient Egyptian motifs more reminiscent of a comic book than of the land of the Pharaohs, and stamped with Chinese signature stamps. The melange of styles doesn't seem to bother anyone. In the Dafen Louvre, entrepreneurship and bad taste go hand in hand.
But what lies inside the building that sports such a pompous name? A shopping mall for cheap art. Many of the tiny sales stands are still empty. Eventually the town's elite producers will exhibit their very own masterpieces here. Some 10 percent of the paintings produced in Dafen are the product of the painters's own creative imagination, according to official statements. But even the originals are less than original. Technical skill may not be lacking, but genuine art is hard to produce on command.
Some five million oil paintings are produced in Dafen every year. Between 8,000 and 10,000 painters toil in the workshops. The numbers are estimates: No one knows the exact figure, which increases by about 100 new painters every year. But it's not just professional copy painters who are drawn to Dafen -- graduates of China's most renowned art academy also come here. They complete only a small number of paintings a month and earn as much as €1,000 ($1,282).
Artwork as Piecework
But artistic quality is in short supply in the Zhi Wei Art Gallery, where a young saleswoman sorts through unframed paintings of bare-breasted women and heroically posed horsemen. "The motifs are based on customer suggestions," the saleswoman says. Dafen's painters will produce whatever customers want. A few brushstrokes are enough to transform Gustav Klimt's famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer into a likeness of the customer's sweetheart. Copies of famous masterpieces -- sometimes more, sometimes less competently executed -- are also very popular. A store right around the corner is selling a copy of "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci. The savior hasn't come out quite right, but the copied painting is still "a bargain, the cheapest in the whole village," as the gallerist points out.
The copied paintings on sale at the Wong Kong Oil Painting & Art Plaza are a little better. A reasonably skillful copy of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" sells for €40 ($51). Buy 100 and the price goes down to €26 ($33), the gallery workers points out. The 100 paintings, guaranteed to have been produced by art academy graduates, ship within three weeks. Customers with less exacting standards can receive their 100 paintings within just one week, for €6 ($8) each. But those paintings aren't produced by academy graduates, the salesman adds.
Wu Han Wu is one of the workers who make their living as piecework producers of fake art. The 29-year-old man left school after grammar school. He shares a cramped top-floor studio with six of his co-workers. They work and live there. Small children play between rolled up canvases. Finished paintings hang suspended from the low ceiling so they can dry. The piecework painters toil away in the dim light for 12 hours every day. They always work on two paintings simultaneously. The workshop is specialized on flowers and landscapes, Wu explains.
A few routine flicks of Wu's brush and a forest appears on the canvas. A small photograph he holds in his hand serves as his model. He's working on a copy of an idyllic French landscape painting, a lavender field in southern France. Wu can churn out between 20 and 30 copies in a day. When a large order arrives, he may have to paint the same motif 1,000 times. "We don't get a fixed wage," he says. "We're paid by the finished painting."
Wu receives the equivalent of €0.30 per copied painting. That means he earns between €100 ($128) and €300 ($385) a month -- barely enough to cover his living expenses and send a little money home. But he doesn't complain: "It's much better in a workshop like this one, without a schedule." Once the painters worked in a factory owned by the company, where they had fixed working hours.
The life Wu and his roommates live is not so different from that of the artists whose works they're copying, at least as far as their average day is concerned: They start painting around lunchtime and work until late at night. But unlike many of his colleagues, who have made a name for themselves in town as artists in their own right, Wu will never paint an original. If he were allowed to paint whatever he wants, he would soon run out of ideas, the young man admits.
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