This is indeed a fascinating book. It combines the methods of art history, ethnography and political economy to tell the story of Dafen “village,” now an urban neighbourhood of Shenzhen, whose residents have come to specialize in the production of hand-painted “copies” of famous Western works of art. The book does not feel like a revised doctoral dissertation in the reading, but the fact that it is, is revealed in a final ironic and humorous, but informative epilogue (see below). Part of the book's appeal is its many ironic twists around the subjects of art, authorship, originality and creativity. Indeed, it opens with an account of an annual state sponsored “Copying Contest” (chapter one).

It moves on to a serious consideration of the organization of production of this “trade painting” industry, concluding that Dafen as a site of production does not epitomize “the sweatshop industrialization of art or naively masterful forgery; instead it houses a range of artistic activities and practices that eminently resemble art practices across the modern and contemporary period” (p. 22) in many parts of the world. “Neither Fordism nor Taylorism would describe the conditions under which Dafen painters labor” (p. 27).

Examining the issue of the level of creativity involved in the production of multiple copies of the same image, Wong concludes, “counterintuitively … that the greater the number of paintings the painter makes, the more “spontaneous,” the more “freehand” and the less mechanical his techniques are” (p. 53).

Wong analyses two locally produced docu-dramas focused on Dafen and its painters for what they reveal about the competing demands of commerce and creativity, among other themes (chapter three). But most interesting is Wong's dissection of the confluence between the postmodern method of artistic “appropriation” and the Dafen project. Reminding us of Marcel Duchamp's use of industrial products in his “art,” and his hiring of a sign painter to render an image nested and signed within one of Duchamp's own paintings (p. 175), and also of Andy Warhol's appropriating images and silk screening them in mass quantities, Wong concludes that the artist-bosses of Dafen greatly resemble the post-modern artists of the contemporary world “with their market savvy, their cultivated taste, their proclaimed independence from the academy, and their very active and diverse practice of delegated art production” (p. 103).

And then, in just one of many delicious ironies, Wong describes how Dafen painters began appropriating Andy Warhol's already appropriated silk-screened image of “Marilyn,” producing oil-on-canvas paintings of the “original” silkscreen, thereby seeming to reverse Warhol's removal of the hand of the artist from the silk screened process of creation/reproduction (p. 21).

However, in yet another twist, Wong points out that while “appropriation is the critical apparatus postmodernists have created in order to challenge the notion of ‘free art’,” Dafen painters [appropriators in their daily work] are themselves utterly beholden to the ideology of free art (p. 229).

Dafen's very existence seems to substantiate the postmodern claim that “everyone is an artist,” since it “shows that there is nothing a painter can do that a farmer [migrant labourer] cannot learn to substitute for” (p. 234).

And then, world conceptual artists began arriving in Dafen to appropriate the appropriators. In one of these projects, a Dafen painter was asked to make a painting from a still image of a film in which Frida Kahlo is posed before an easel; the first painter was photographed painting from the still image, and the photograph was then given to a second painter to render; the second painter at work was photographed and that image was given to a third painter to render; and so on, and so on. The exhibition of the finished paintings was called “Chinese Whispers” after the English children's game, in American English “Telephone” (p. 225).

In the Dafen “Lisa Project,” 500 artists were commissioned to make copies of the Mona Lisa, which were exhibited bound together edge to edge and top to bottom at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (p. 212–13).

Along the way, Wong interrogates the notion of “art,” and is generally sympathetic to the claim that Dafen's “copyists” are in their own way creative, skilled and spontaneous despite the fact that representations of Dafen by both state agents and artistic avant-gardes “consistently demonstrate the extreme disjuncture between the … labor and trade practices of Dafen village and … contemporary notions of conceptual labor and authorship…[the latter] the result of powerful and well-defended presumptions separating true art from commercial labor” (p. 216).

“Terms and phrases like ‘fake art’, ‘black market’, ‘forgery’, and ‘counterfeit art’ are often used to describe Dafen paintings. These terms invoke a highly affected if multi-faceted legal-cultural expectation of ‘true’ art: that which is signed, framed, hand painted, and guaranteed. Dafen practices appear to ‘deconstruct’ this complex shrine of authorial intention at every level of ‘craft’” (p. 182–83).

So the ultimate question comes down to: “Can the status of ‘art’ be bestowed on Dafen paintings through the discourse and practice of postmodernist appropriation that is dominant in the contemporary art world in both China and the West?” (p. 218). Wong certainly makes a convincing a case for it, although I remain unsure.

In the ironic epilogue, a Dafen painter who makes a living selling his own original works of art offers to ghost-write Wong's dissertation for her. After all, he reminds her, he knows Dafen far better than she, and he even offers a very cogent overview of what the final thesis might look like. I take Wong at her word that she didn't accept the offer.

There is much more in this book worthy of highlighting, but limitations of space prevent saying much more here, short of encouraging the readers of this review to get this book, and enjoy the read. You may not embrace Wong's rationalization of Dafen's raison d’être, but the engagement is sure to be rewarding.