Fakes, replicas and forgeries: What counts as art?

When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined.

The Chinese village was known for mass producing copies of Western art. She’d read about it in The New York Times, which described a kind of compound where thousands of artists painted replicas of famous artworks, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or van Gogh’s Starry Night, for European and U.S. hotels and condos.

“We had an expectation, which was that there would be this giant factory,” said Wong, a professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley. “And in this factory, there would be these painters working in an assembly line fashion: One person would paint the rocks, and one person would paint the trees, and one person would paint the sky.”

But when she arrived in the small gated village, what she saw surprised her. In 2013, she published van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, a book about her six years of research in Dafen and how it forever changed the way she thinks about art and authenticity and the nature of creativity.

Key takeaways:

- The reality of replica painting in China is more complex and nuanced than the stereotypical image of assembly-line factories.
- There is much greater similarity between the most successful artists and the most accused forger than many of us can imagine.
- The anxiety around AI-generated art today parallels earlier concerns about globalization and outsourcing of manufacturing. Both challenge traditional notions of creativity, originality and the value of human-made art.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see more photos on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts): https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/31/berkeley-voices-transformation-series-ep-6-art-replicas/
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Photo by José Joaquin Figueroa.

This year on Berkeley Voices, we're exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we explore how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.

See all episodes of the series: https://news.berkeley.edu/topics/berkeley-voices-transformation/

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