China’s Van Goghs

The film describes an artistic workshop situated in the city of Dafen, located in the Shenzhe region, in the south of China. In this laboratory young lowborn people work to produce copies of Van Gogh paintings, which are then shipped and sold all over the world. The owner, Xiaoyong Zhao, has the dream of visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to see the real paintings of his beloved master. China’s Van Goghs is a film focused on the artistic aspirations of a simple man whose life is completely absorbed by the trade of canvases whose stereotypical subjects are repeated endlessly. Zhao, after a life spent in direct contact with the art of the master, is able to understand the value of his own free creativity. In the background, there are the contrasts of a fast developing country, of which we know just a part, where the workers work from dawn to dusk, the taxi drivers hold Mao’s santini on the dashboard, and young painters live the globalized myth of a famous western artist. The revealing moment of this vivid documentary is the scene where Zhao and his workers watch the famous film by Vincente Minnelli, Lust for Life, where a tormented Kirk Douglas plays the Dutch master.