Beginning of dafen oil painting village

 

 

In the past, Dafen was a rural village in Buji Town, with an area of 0.77 square kilometers as well as a population of merely 300 or so. The local villagers lived on growing rice, earning an annual income of not more than RMB300 yuan per capita.

In 1989, an oil painting dealer from Hong Kong, named Huang Jiang, settled down in the village. He began to copy, replicate, purchase and sell oil paintings by using the cheap villagers' houses and labor force. Thus he introduced the special oil painting industry into Dafen. Along with the expanding market and growing fame of Dafen, more and more art workers, skilled artists and dealers came and began the scale production and sales of oil paintings in the village. This is the beginning of the oil painting industry in Dafen.