Title: DAFEN the Urban Village, a laboratory for creation, from copying to creating
Directors: WEI Shaonong & Eric DAYRE
Discipline: Architecture and Literature
Status: Completed Project
Starting date: 2018/2016. This project is the development of the project Positive architecture: poetics and the transformation of urban centers(PAPTUC) incubated at JoRISS from 2016 to 2017 under the direction of WEI Shaonong & Eric DAYRE.
Summary
During Mr WU’s visit, a furthering program of research was established at the junction of design, architecture and art studies, both from a social and historical point of view, involving a reflection on cultural exchanges and trade, the relations of copy work and original work that remain an essential problem in aesthetic studies and a problem which is essential to modern and contemporary literature and literary theory in the era of world literature. The wider scope of this research lies in the possibilities of understanding the relations and exchange of repetition, modelizing and innovative actions, tradition and modernity (or” post-modernity”), memory and renewal in the contemporary world at large, as seen through the prototype situation and multi-layered problematics that the village of Dafen represents in a nutshell.
The village of Dafen is situated in the area of Shenzen. It is famous for its concentration of painters involved in the copying of paintings has become an example of China’s new « patrimony» and recognized as an economic and cultural asset by Chinese authorities. It is part of a vast scheme of urban planning through “Dafen International Art Community”, a center of design (Shenzhen Center for Design and Shenzhen & Hongkong Bi-City Biennial of Urban/Architecture) has been set up, the Dafen Art Museum has been built, and a program of artist in residency has also been organized. At the same time, Dafen has attracted public notice in the recent years and a documentary has been shot "China's Van Goghs" , and a study of the various processes and actions taking place in terms of art has been published by Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand – China and the Readymade, University of Chicago Press, 2013, 302 pages. Still, the political and urban context of Dafen, the importance and symbolical function of its development at large has not been documented. This is precisely the dimension with which our developing project wishes to tackle.