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ChapterO Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1797' THE FACTORY IMAGINARY Writing in the late eighteenth century and in a European intellectual milieu Chapter that sought to establish a firm distinction betWeen the fine and mechanical arts, Goethe warned of a bleak future in which that distinction would be undone by the forces of industry. Two decades earlier, the "totally mechan­ ical operations" of a wide range of trades, crafts, and industries had been dissected and visualized in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie (1751-1772). Chapter Significantly, Alexandre Deleyre's essay describing an eighteen-step manufac­ turing process of the pin "in the Encyclopedie would be adapted by Adam Smith for the first chapter of the Wealth of Nations (1776), laying the foundation for his influential argument that economic progress would be driven by ever finer Chapte divisions of labor leading to ever greater productivity.' The division of labor and the separation of tasks, harnessed into new forms of work organization that were transforming the production of goods in Europe, took on visual prominence just as the modern notion of art emerged as a domain indepen­ Chapt dent from the trades. Chap 35 At the heart of this short essay, Goethe distinguished "true art," from the The China trade of Goethe's time ended in 1848 with the British invasion of pretty, elegant, pleasing, and ephemeral objects made by the "purely mechan­ China that forcibly ended the trade regime centered in the Guangzhou port. ical artist," and criticized the burgeoning artistocratic taste for ceramic and In the century of tumult that followed, the production of decorative art and print reproductions.' As the Goethe scholar Catriona MacLeod has argued, painting in South China for Western consumption did not dissipate. On the the obvious target of Goethe's essay was the ceramics manufacturer Josiah contrary, under late Imperial, Republican, and then Socialist governments, Wedgwood, the English imitator of Chinese export porcelain, instrumental new forms of art, craft, decorative objects, industrial art, and paintings for in introducing industrial practices like clocking-in at his manufacturies.• export were invented and created, as were niche markets for export and trade Indeed, Goethe derisively referred to Wedgwood's wares as "modern-antique to the West. Under the centrally planned economy, for example, the Canton ceramics," and argued that they were no greater a luxury than "a plain china Export Trade and Commodities Trade Fair was established once again in vase, a pretty wallpaper, or a pair of fine buckles.''• He contrasted these mind­ Guangzhou in 1957, to revive a form of the earlier controlled export trade. In Jess imitations of the mechanical artist, "whose thousandth work is like his 1978, when China's reformist leaders looked for a model of cautious reintegra­ first," with true art, true wealth, and true experience. Manufacture, here, tion with the global market, it was once again to Guangdong and its Qing-era becomes a sort of false making, pictured in opposition to the authenticity of trade associations that they turned.' The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, artisanal and artistic labor. Taking the argument to its limit, Goethe ended located less than 150 kilometers from Guangzhou itself, was established for this piece with a rhetorical description of a "great painting factory" (die this expressed purpose. gro~e Gemiihlde-Fabrik), in which even paintings could be reproduced on an The emergence of large-scale export oil painting in Shenzhen thus grew assembly line. Such a nightmare would be possible only if consumers allowed out of this longstanding (if forgotten) modern cultural encounter, one in themselves to be the willing participants of industrialization, which was, for which intensive Sino-Western trade has connected the Western consumer Goethe, "rushing onward with irresistible force."• demand for oil paintings and visual images with the work of skilled painters As in the present day, China looms large if uncertain in these European in China for over two centuries. Although this study is concerned with the rhetorics of art, taste, production, and industrialization. It is perhaps ironic era after 1978, in this opening chapter, I have put forth a "beginning" set in that two out of three of Goethe's preferred objects-the plain china vase and the late eighteenth century in order to also rhetorically draw out the most the pretty wallpaper-were standard products of Chinese export, introduced obvious-and Eurocentric-explanation for Dafen village's existence. Isn't in large scale to the consumer market in Europe in the eighteenth century. the painting production of Dafen simply the result of an inexorable process Indeed, if it existed anywhere at all, Goethe's great painting factory may well of industrializ'!tion extending even unto fine art, a two-hundred-year belated have been found in the port city of Guangzhou (Canton), where Samuel Wells end to the Romantic forewarning? By this retrospective narrative, centered in Williams estimated in 1848 that as many two to three thousand painters were Europe's industrialization, Dafen's development could be easily explained, if employed in producing oil and watercolor paintings for the global market.' not predicted, by those well-established drivers of industrialization: the ever By the early nineteenth century, numerous European and American travelers finer separation of tasks, the ever greater division of labor, the assembly of were writing travel accounts of their visits to Guangzhou's painting studios, workers under ever larger roofs, the degradation of artisanal knowledge, the where they bought and commissioned paintings and sat for portraits. These deskilling of the workforce, the perfecting of technical imitation by machines studios were situated on the two streets nestled between the thirteen foreign and mechanistic operations, and the mass deception of uneducated consum­ "factories," though this is a term that should not be mistaken for a place of ers. Presented as the great painting factory of the romantic expectation, we mass production, for it referred then to the residences and storerooms of would have, in contemporary China, the simple and final instantiation of "factors," designated agents of the European National Companies.' Though "fake art." this is a subject to be taken up elsewhere, the objects and images made, in the In examining the early development of the painting trade in Dafen vil­ eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Chinese painters for European lage in this chapter, I find much to question in this powerful narrative and its consumption deeply influenced the taste of European consumers, but also attendant presumptions for the inauthentic mechanization and alienation of those of cultural elites who, like Goethe, were in the midst of forging the mod­ the would-be artist. Examining the successive rise of Dafen's three largest ern parameters of art, craft, and industry. firms from 1989 to 2009, I argue here that the dystopic expectations for labor 36 CHAPTER ONE IMAGINING THE GREAT PAINTING FACTORY 37 under the "industrialization of art" does not so much explain Dafen's develop­ As tantalizing as these headlines were, these journalists provided few facts ment as function as a cultural imaginary shared by its producers, consumers, with which to substantiate their claims. Despite utilizing vivid photography and intermediaries. and video, few of the newspaper articles and television programs on Dafen Drawing upon the work of historians and sociologists who have studied village included any description of work inside a workshop or a factory, rely­ capitalist labor processes in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and specifically ing instead on short quotations from Dafen painters and official spokesmen, on their attention to the self-fashioning of workers and bosses,'0 I argue here which only further ironized their improbable existence. Hence, the unverified that the Romanticist anxiety of industrialization so succinctly expressed in tropes could be stretched so far that one Australian journalist could tell the Goethe's 1797 essay continues to be deeply involved in giving form to an artistic reader to "take your pick of the Old Masters rolling off the assembly line,'' but hierarchy that is distinct from European experience or expectation.