Need a da Vinci for the living room? Clifford Coonan visits an artists' colony in southern China, where fake art is big business.
Dealers in the village of Dafen, home to 2,000 painters churning out remarkable copies of famous works of art, like to cut quickly to the chase when it comes to selling their wares. "We can give you Tintoretto's View of Venice for 500 yuan," says Xu Yi, a gallery owner, and occasional pointillist, in this painters' village, tucked away in the outskirts of the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen.
She asks where I'm from, then whips out a calculator to do the maths.
"Or we can do you a deal on a Matisse, just €15. Or a Van Gogh for €12. The Sunflowers. You like the Sunflowers? You can pay in Chinese money or euros. Renoir. Monet. What do you want?"
Behind her in the narrow gallery, carefully executed Gaugin rip-offs sit uneasily beside a startling 1970s prog-rock fantasy-album-cover style of blonde maidens kissing a green-skinned, winged nymph. Fin-de-siecle Toulouse-Lautrec knock-offs rub shoulders with alarming photo-realist Pamela Andersons in oils, all looked down upon by a stern-eyed portrait of an American bald-headed eagle.
The Dafen Painters' Village was originally an artists' colony set up by a Hong Kong businessman 15 years ago, who allowed local painters to live and work for nothing if they painted a sideline in good quality fakes.
It's not a village in the traditional sense, more like Temple Bar in Dublin than a remote Chinese locality, but it is a locality given over totally to art, most of it reproduced. It's a business model that you see in many Asian countries, especially Vietnam. But like so many other things in China, it's the scale in the Dafen colony that takes your breath away - the thousands of artists working here are supplying at least 300 galleries. At the front you have the galleries, out the back the painters knock out the knock-offs.
"We have about 16 artists working for this shop. Different customers like different things. The Russians like Tintoretto, they also like this painting of the maidens kissing. We've sold 50 of these Tintorettos at least, we can do 100 copies for you if you want," says Xu.
She's wearing a smart business suit - corporate clients are a big source of revenue. And the suits come in droves from the rapidly expanding city of Shenzhen. Every office block you go to, the lobby has been decorated by Dafen's finest. Every plush villa you visit has at least some Dafen wares on the walls.
Newly rich chief executives commission paintings in the style of their favourite artist - all perfectly legal, and all perfectly original. Others opt for a style, usually Impressionism, and have all the big names represented in their offices - Renoir, Manet, Monet, whatever you want. "How about this?" Xu goes off to the back of the shop and re-emerges with the Mona Lisa herself, that discreet smile perfectly captured by an artist working on around €7 a day.
The Norwegian national gallery recently had its copy of Edvard Munch's The Scream stolen. If they're stuck, they could do worse than ask Xu for a copy by their in-house painters. If they're interested, she has one ready to go.
The most popular work of art on offer, by a big margin, is Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers. There are thousands for sale in the shops of Dafen, which was been recently renovated and reorganised to deal with all the visitors.
Walk through a door at the back of Xu Yi's shop and you come into a long corridor, lined with easels and painters busily working on the latest masterpieces.Neighbouring artist Lu Xingping is doing The Flowers in the Vase. By Van Gogh, of course.
"It takes about one-and-a-half days to do a Van Gogh like this one," she says, dabbing blobs of oil paint onto the canvas, occasionally referring to a small catalogue copy of the original.
"I went to art school and I found it hard to make ends meet painting my own things. The most popular painting depends on market demands really. Sometimes one kind is popular, sometimes another kind is popular," says Lu, who lives with her family in Dafen. She gestures to the painting with her brush. "I don't know how many times I've painted this picture but I've been doing it for over 10 years. Probably hundreds of times."
Something looks slightly wrong with the painting. It's a reasonably accurate representation, but something is askew, out of place. Are the colours different?
"Yes, some people want me to change the background - this painting had a white background originally. If people have a different colour scheme in their house, they might want a blue Van Gogh rather than a yellow one. It depends on the client. We'll do whatever they want."
A green book of art history, 100 Great Paintings functions as a catalogue for the painters. The index at the back is a list of what you can buy.
A Surrealist masterpiece seems like the most relevant choice in these circumstances. So, any chance of a nice Rene Magritte for above my sofa? No joy - not in the catalogue. A Dali, however, is doable. "Salvador Dali is very hard: lots of colours, and lots of detail. But we can do it, just give us a bit of time."
She flicks through another catalogue until we come to The Apotheosis of Homer by Salvador Dali. Her eyes dart around the picture, she starts to nod. "Give me a couple of weeks. I can do it." Or perhaps her husband can do it more easily in the studio, she adds.
Walking the two streets across to her husband's studio, there are groups of people stretching large canvases and making big wooden frames.
Dafen has plenty of room for both the sacred and the profane. In one shop is an enormous reproduction of Adolph von Menzel's wonderful A flute concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci.
This is a wonderful piece, but not massively well known unless you had followed its progress from the Old National Gallery in Berlin to exhibition in London and back again.
On the opposite wall stands a painting of the the Brazilian Holy Trinity of Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos and Rivaldo holding hands. Both works are painted with the same care and skill. You work out which is sacred, which profane.
Up five flights of stairs to the artist's garret and the smell of oils is strong. In the philosophy of Confucius, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Ling Junqi's studio is a truly Confucian place. There are racks of the inevitable Sunflowers on display, hanging out to dry, alongside a couple of other Van Goghs.
Ling has been a painter for 12 years. "When I graduated I was supposed to be an art teacher but the salary and the prospects weren't that good. So I left my home town and came to Shenzhen to try and find a better life," he says.
In a country where everything can be counterfeited, Dafen is relatively harmless - fake paintings are less of a threat than fake car parts or medicines. And it's not exactly the fine art equivalent of the local pirate DVD shop.
There are few enough works by living artists on show - the maxim that only paintings by dead artists sell was never truer than in Dafen.This is more about Renoir than Lucien Freud.
"I do my own work as well but I'm not as famous as the others so I can't sell them for a good price," says Ling.
"I keep my painting as a hobby and I'm looking for an opportunity. I really want to be a professional artist but for the moment I'm doing copies. I don't really like doing commercial painting but it's the pressure of reality. I love art, I love Van Gogh, I love Monet."
Ling is energetic and enthusiastic, though long hours of painting reproduction masterpieces is tiring him out he says.
But he'll stick with it: his wife and he have a child to support and, now, a gallery in the painters' village to fund. "I remember the details of the paintings over the years," he says.
The painters and gallery owners have a hard time making ends meet - "rents have become expensive in the village since they modernised everything".
National pride is strong and Ling is keen to show it's not just the Old Masters of Europe. He pulls out a catalogue of work by one of China's top painters, Zao Wuji.
"I love him. I try to copy him too," he says, grinning, and casting an appreciative eye over the canvas as he unscrolls a brilliant reproduction of one of Zao Wuji's better known pieces.
"Not as good as the real thing, maybe. But it's not bad, now, is it?"
