Art Imitates Art

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
There’s a phrase from Shenzhen, China that goes, “Time is money, efficiency is life,’ and over the last forty years the city has wasted no time, becoming one of the most productive manufacturing hubs in the world. But along with making 90% of the world’s electronics, it’s also a place that is known for producing lots of convincing, high end knock-offs.

Vivian Le:
Not just sneakers, but imitation Yeezys. Not just purses, but counterfeit Gucci clutches.

Roman Mars:
Producer Vivian Le.

Vivian Le:
Shenzhen even has a mall that’s famous for its faux versions of big designer brands. It’s a popular destination for YouTubers to drop by and film click-baity videos titled “CHINA’S FAKE SHOPPING MALLS” or “SHENZHEN FAKE MARKET INSANITY!!”

YOUTUBE AUDIO
[WHAT IS UP, GOOD MORNING! WE ARE NOW IN SHENZHEN AND WE ARE ONCE AGAIN ON OUR WAY TO THE FAKE MARKET HERE!]

Roman Mars:
Hey guys! Don’t forget to smash that subscribe button!

Vivian Le:
But there’s a small neighborhood within Shenzhen that will have you second guessing the line between “fake” and “authentic.”

Roman Mars:
It’s known for mass-producing copies of the most celebrated works of Western art. Monets , Manets, Matisses…. All painted by hand. All painted quickly. And all painted in one place–

Vivian Le:
It’s called Dafen Village.

Winnie Wong:
I had heard about dafen Village, and when I first heard about it, I thought, Oh, of course, there is a village in China that was completely uninteresting because it seemed so stereotypical.

Vivian Le:
This is Winnie Wong, she’s an art historian and author of the book “Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade”.

Winnie Wong:
I used to take a lot of people through Dafen Village. And one time I was taking a woman from Hong Kong through it. And as we walked through, the first question she asked me was Which of these are the fakes? And I thought, Well, that’s actually a very complex question.

Vivian Le:
We typically think of the craft of oil painting as a slow, meticulous, even romantic process, but the pace is dramatically different in Dafen. At its height, 60% of the world’s oil paintings were made in this .4 square kilometer village by Chinese workers.

Roman Mars:
This type of manufacturing is called trade painting. Trade-painting is not necessarily art with a capital A. It doesn’t command the same kind of respect because it’s made quickly and cheaply in order to sell as generic decor.

Vivian Le:
There is a very good chance that you’ve been in the presence of a painting made in Dafen. Perhaps you passed by one at the dentist’s office, or in a conference room of a Marriott in Orlando. You may have even hung one up in your home without even realizing it.

Roman Mars:
Dafen is a place that’s been vilified, romanticized, and analyzed since it came into the world’s collective consciousness specifically because of what it manufactures.

Winnie Wong:
If you think about it, it’s completely arbitrary, but it’s arbitrary in that it’s a product of Western culture. That oil painting means something–different from a ceramic pot or an iPhone, right?

Vivian Le:
We can imagine the mechanical processes involved in mass producing something like a lamp or exercise equipment… but what happens in Dafen feels entirely different. Simply because the objects being mass produced are oil paintings.

Roman Mars:
Prior to the 1980s, the city of Shenzhen was mostly farmland.

Vivian Le:
And Dafen was just an ordinary rural village, not really known for anything in particular, let alone art.

Winnie Wong:
I have one photograph of it from probably 1970s. And it is, yeah, just three– two, three rows of houses, one taller. We call it “diaolou”. And a lot of fields. That’s… that’s all

Roman Mars:
But Dafen’s fate was very quickly transformed by a monumental moment in modern Chinese history, the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.

[MUSIC – STORY OF SPRING]

Vivian Le:
There’s a legend about the founding of Shenzhen.. that in 1979 Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping drew a circle on a map by the South China Sea and determined that Shenzhen would be the home of China’s first special economic zone. It would be a controlled area where China could open up to the rest of the world and experiment with market capitalism by offering special tax benefits to encourage foreign investment.

Roman Mars:
It was a modern, neoliberal fairy tale that was even celebrated in song… this song actually called Story of Spring.

[MUSIC CONTINUES]

Roman Mars:
It depicts the moment when Shenzhen sprang forth from anonymity, mythically building a city that rose to the sky and mountains of gold… as if by magic…

[MUSIC FADES OUT]

Winnie Wong:
But It was not. There were very good historical and strategic reasons to place a special economic zone there.

Roman Mars:
If you want to know more about SEZs, you should go back and listen to the previous episode of 99pi episode, the one right before this one. It involves an airport in Ireland-–I can’t explain it here, just listen. Okay, carry on…

Vivian Le:
As Shenzhen rapidly transformed throughout the 1980s, businesses started moving there for the cheap real estate, inexpensive migrant labor, and low cost of living. Many of these businesses came from neighboring Hong Kong.

Winnie Wong:
Among all the first enterprising businesspeople to move into Shenzhen were Hong Kong businessmen, of course, because they were right there.

Vivian Le:
One of those early enterprising businessmen was a former painter named Huang Jiang.

Roman Mars:
According to the plaques in Dafen, in 1989 Huang Jiang traveled from Hong Kong and rented out a residential building in Dafen with intent to manufacture and export oil paintings.

Vivian Le:
Huang Jiang recruited a team of twenty painters and began churning out hand-painted copies of Picassos, Van Gogh’s and Da Vinci’s. Here he is in an interview explaining how he was able to divide the labor between many different painters.

ARCHIVAL TAPE
[TRANSLATION: I TAUGHT THEM TO PAINT AS IF THEY WERE ON AN ASSEMBLY LINE. SOME PAINTED A SKY, SOME PAINTED MOUNTAINS, AND OTHERS PAINTED TREES.]

June Wang:
When you divided the painting to different parts, it’s easier for them to handle, especially for wholesale. That really matters because otherwise you cannot finish the painting.

Vivian Le:
This is June Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the City University of Hong Kong. Huang Jiang and other entrepreneurial painting bosses focused on copying famous works of western art because any artist who has been dead for more than fifty years wasn’t protected by Chinese copyright laws, but also they were aiming to sell their products to businesses all over the world.

June Wang:
Huang Jiang matters at a time in the initial period, because he has that connection to quite a lot of Hong Kong dealers.

Vivian Le:
All around Hong Kong, hotels, financial centers, and airports were being built, and those brand new buildings needed to be decorated with lots of cheap, nondescript art. But really, those connections to Hong Kong were important because that was the gateway to businesses in the West.

Roman Mars:
Dafen’s oil paintings were sold and exported to hotels, real estate developers, and retailers like K-Mart and Walmart, and painters were churning out wholesale orders just as quickly as the western businesses were gobbling them up.

Vivian Le:
It’s actually pretty common for factory towns in mainland China to develop around a single type of production. There are areas that specialize in manufacturing only buttons, or jeans, or violins and in this case, Dafen developed around manufacturing oil paintings.

Winnie Wong:
When people came to Dafen in the first phase, it was really, truly people with no education like really people– rural people who had no outlet but who had some aptitude and maybe their parents or a cousin or a friend said, “Hey, you like painting? Why don’t you come and try this.”

Vivian Le:
If a person was looking for work and had a little bit of artistic ability, Dafen was the place to go.

Roman Mars:
By the late 1990s, Dafen had exported millions of artworks and the streets were becoming packed with painters, people stretching canvases, art supplies…

Philip Tinari:
Honestly, it’s a little bit claustrophobic. You’ve never seen so many paintings, right?

Vivian Le:
This is Philip Tinari, Director and CEO of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.

Philip Tinari:
Streets and streets. Stores and stores that go on and go in, and there’s just more than you could ever see.

Roman Mars:
And you could find all sorts of paintings in Dafen. The most well-known were the replicas of famous works of Western art: the Mona Lisa, the Birth of Venus, etc. Then there was a smaller market for original creations by local artists.

Philip Tinari:
You know, you had a wide variety of different kinds of production going on there – everything from a hotel decorator who would come in with an order for a few hundred canvases made to certain specs in terms of color and content.

Vivian Le:
You could also commission a painter to copy any image. So if you had a picture of say… oh, I don’t know… your boss singing karaoke at a staff retreat, you could actually email that photo to a painter in Dafen and they would send that image back to you as an oil painting on canvas.

[ROMAN MARS: SORRY, WHAT WAS THAT?]

[VIVIAN LE: NOTHING–]

Philip Tinari:
It’s sort of an earlier moment of e-commerce, but very primitive. But I think there was kind of an interesting way of looking at how images moved and were transformed and this moment when they’re transformed from digital and to physical and what that meant.

Vivian Le:
Winnie Wong spent a lot of time in Dafen and actually apprenticed as a painter in a workshop. She found out that some artists are easier to copy than others.

Winnie Wong:
The easiest paintings and the lowest paid were Van Gogh paintings–

Roman Mars:
Man, Van Gogh just can’t catch a break…

Winnie Wong:
And then I learned that there was a progression. You go from Van Gogh painting to Impressionism and then from Impressionism eventually to French academic painting.

Vivian Le:
And then the hardest and most highly-regarded style would be neoclassical paintings.

Winnie Wong:
So let’s say a David with the Coronation of Josephine would be like, you know what you would paint to show that you’re really good painter.

Vivian Le:
Repetition, a strong network of workers, and efficiency is how Dafen painters were able to fulfill large wholesale orders. Wong says that the average painter could produce 1-2 paintings a day, but experienced workers could churn out much more.

Winnie Wong:
People would challenge themselves. One of my friends, he, you know, he explained, you know, he’s like, “I didn’t believe it too when I started, but I came to specialize in fruit paintings.”

Vivian Le:
This particular friend was really competitive so kept working at it until he could figure out some shortcuts to reduce a painting down to a few brush strokes.

Winnie Wong:
And he said finally, he reached the peak of 26 paintings a day, and he did it by using a specific set of brushes that he would, you know, tailor. And in such a way that he could paint a grape with two stripes and an apple with three stripes, right? So he developed essentially his own kind of repetitive method, his own specialized tools.

Roman Mars:
Of course, not everyone was producing 26 paintings a day, but many painters could work very long and very tiring hours for not a lot of pay.

Vivian Le:
But June Wang told me that, especially in the early years, most painters in Dafen came from rural farming backgrounds who didn’t have a pathway to a career in the arts. Also, painting was a very different type of creative labor that pushed against stereotypes of what migrant workers could do.

June Wang:
Because of the discriminationm, migrant workers are very tired about this – this image. They are either on the construction site or in the factories, so for many painter workers, they also take this as a success.

Vivian Le:
If you ask a thousand different painters from Dafen whether they are happy, you will probably get a thousand different answers. Everyone has their own motivations for going there, and what they ultimately want to do.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Dafen painters probably would have continued quietly creating millions of the world’s art replicas with little fanfare, but in the early 2000s, it happened to catch the attention of the government of Shenzhen.

June Wang:
So Shenzhen is trying to change its image and become more, you know, high end. But Shenzhen doesn’t really have that kind of a base, especially if you talk about culture. Shenzhen doesn’t really have a long history for Chinese people. Shenzhen is a desert of culture.

Vivian Le:
Wang says that Shenzhen had quickly become an epicenter for science and technology, but when it came to culture and social cohesion, the local government felt that it was behind, mostly because the city was still so new.

Roman Mars:
The population of Shenzhen had exploded from around 59,000 people in 1980 to 7.7 million by the early 2000s, most of whom were migrant workers who came from all over the country with different local customs and even languages and when it came to culture and the arts, leadership needed to start from scratch.

Vivian Le:
This wasn’t just unique to Shenzhen. A lot of areas of mainland China had undergone incredibly rapid urbanization, and by the early 2000s the Chinese government was beginning to understand how fundamental cultural and creative industries like the arts or music were to urban and economic development. Science and technology parks were great for job creation, but they believed that if you wanted to foster a strong society, you needed things like museums, opera houses, and arts districts.

Roman Mars:
In order to incubate creative development, the government decided to target interesting regions of the country–like Dafen–and promote them as “cultural hubs.”

Philip Tinari:
This is something that happens pretty often in Chinese urban development. Dafen had distinguished itself as this place where painting happens and then what’s the next step? Can you make it into a cultural hub? Can you make it into an art district? Can you build a museum? Can you attract tourists? You know? Where do you go from there?

Roman Mars:
However, the government wanted to lean away from the image of fake masterpieces because to them, replicating art was not the same thing as creating art. They didn’t want Dafen to settle for being a “copy village,” when it could be a center for original art and creativity.

Vivian Le:
So the goal was to transform Dafen from a copycat village into a legitimate artist district starting with its urban development.

Winnie Wong:
They did, you know, fix the sewage, you know, beautify the sidewalks. You know, they did do these things that one would expect a good government to do.

Vivian Le:
The local government paved the roads and updated housing. They also formed artists associations, hosted cultural fairs, and offered incentives to attract art school educated artists in order to bolster Dafen’s art cred.

Roman Mars:
The propaganda department even got involved to come up with more inventive ways to elevate Dafen’s reputation.

Winnie Wong:
They hired a novelist to write a novel. There was a movie, there were songs. They made a television series.

[MUSIC FROM “THE FATE OF PAINTING”]

Vivian Le:
There were actually multiple television series based around Dafen, like this show called “The Fate of Painting” about a woman who comes to a Dafen-like village to find her estranged father, but is confronted by secrets, romance, and art.

Roman Mars:
The local government even took pains to address concerns of copyright infringement in Dafen.

Winnie Wong:
They handed out copyright law books. They held, like, sessions on copyright infringement. They were concerned about this narrative that they were copyright infringers and they wanted to promote creativity, originality.

Vivian Le:
But as Dafen’s profile rose, it didn’t just gain the attention of the local government or artists, it was also starting to catch the attention of the rest of the world.

Roman Mars:
Around the same time that Dafen was undergoing its government-led culture project, western media outlets were beginning to catch wind of this small village in China that pumped out hand-painted replicas of Western works of art. The West had been buying these paintings for years, but most people were just now beginning to understand where they came from and who was making them.

Vivian Le:
In the beginning, the international coverage was the opposite of what leadership was going for. A lot of news coverage focused on the image of an army of factory workers slaving away to pump out counterfeit paintings into the art market.

Roman Mars:
There were headlines like ‘Own Original Chinese Copies of Real Western Art!’ and ‘Van Gogh From the Sweatshop!’

Philip Tinari:
There was a New York Times story early on and I think it confirmed a lot of prejudices people had about China at that moment as a place where things were being knocked off and copied. And what’s the highest level of knockoff and copying? It’s forging art. Right?

Vivian Le:
Here’s Philip Tinari from the UCCA again.

Philip Tinari:
This is the moment of fake DVDs and counterfeit products and IP theft. So it was also easy to come at it from a lens like here they are copying this person or that person in a kind of piratical way where it wasn’t.. I’m not sure, essentially, what was going on.

Vivian Le:
At the time, Dafen was being swept up in larger debates about China’s place on the global stage. What was happening at Dafen was a complex intermingling of migrant labor, craft, local policy, and globalism. It was reduced into yet another story about how the West was the source of authenticity and China was ripping it off. Ironically, Dafen painters were being criticized for fulfilling a market that was created by the very people who demanded these paintings.

Roman Mars:
Of course, art forgery can and does happen in China, but it also happens everywhere. Plus, no one believed that the $30 painting they ordered from Shenzhen was an original Gustav Klimt. These paintings weren’t intended to sit in a gallery or museum, they were meant to spruce up the wall of a conference room.

Vivian Le:
By 2008 Dafen had undergone its urban makeover and had even formally changed its name to Dafen Oil Painting Village but it was never quite able to shake its image as the copy capital of the world.

June Wang:
It is a very successful, very well-known in terms of high concentration of high concentration of painters but at the same time, Dafen is always haunted by this image of copying.

Vivian Le:
It might not have become the bastian for “original” art, but the streets were cleaner, there was a lot more creative energy in the air, and the industry was booming. At least it was until–

ARCHIVAL TAPE
[IT WAS A MANIC MONDAY ON THE FINANCIAL MARKETS, THE DOW TUMBLED MORE THAN 500 POINTS AFTER TWO PILLARS OF THE STREET TUMBLED OVER THE WEEKEND…]

Roman Mars:
In 2008, the global financial crisis rocked Wall Street and reverberated throughout the rest of the world, even reaching the small painting village of Dafen.

VL:
Before 2008, around 80% of paintings made in Dafen were exported to the West. But the financial crisis had a severe impact on real estate development all over the world. Fewer construction projects meant there were fewer blank walls that required cheap, unobjectionable decoration. Sales in Dafen plummeted by 50%.

Winnie Wong:
You know, by 2015, it was very, very quiet in Dafen and quiet, meaning there was a lot less business.

Vivian Le:
But even though business dropped a lot for Dafen, it didn’t disappear completely. With the Chinese real estate boom and with a rising middle class within the country, Dafen had a new Chinese market to tap into, which meant there were different artistic styles to cater to.

Vivian Le:
I know a while back, the famous, like, Van Gogh and the Mona Lisa – those used to be popular and that’s not so popular anymore?

Chris Shi:
Just a few customers buy these kind of paintings. Most of the customers buy modern art – very, very popular. Very beautiful images.

Vivian Le:
This is Chris Shi, he’s the owner of a painting company called Shenzhen Melga Art that’s been based in Dafen since 2017. He says that those replicas of classical western art that put Dafen on the map aren’t really in vogue anymore. His buyers want modern, abstract, and original paintings.

Roman Mars:
In recent years things have been more challenging in Dafen. Business never fully recovered after the 2008 financial crisis, and a lot of painters and bosses have moved out of the area because gentrification made it a less affordable place to live.

Chris Shi:
You know, in Shenzhen area the factory rent, you know? Very expensive. The cost is expensive.

Vivian Le:
The internet has made it possible to work from anywhere, so people have been moving to places with lower costs of living. There isn’t as much reason to have a centralized painting industry anymore.

Chris Shi:
The stores, the stores in Dafen Village, uh… their business become worse and worse.

Vivian Le:
Coming into reporting this, I thought that the type of labor that was happening in Dafen was wholly different from fine art, but I’m not so sure anymore. The truth is that the distinction between mass production and individual artistry has always been blurry. Artists all over the world like Jeff Koonz have quietly used laborers and fabricators in order to execute their grand ideas. Dafen painters actually let us in on that process, and show us that relationship in an unambiguous way.

Eddie Colla:
You could look at Damien Hirst or Koonz and say, “Well, that’s that’s what they’re doing,” you know. Or go back to Warhol in the factory where it’s really you’re overseeing a project, you know, you’re sort of the architect of the project. But the labor is being done by multiple people or in multiple places or in multiple stages.

Vivian Le:
This is Eddie Colla, he’s a mixed-media artist who spoke with me from beautiful, noisy east Oakland, CA.

Roman Mars:
A lot of notable artists have actually used Dafen painters sort of like ghostwriters. They come up with the concept, and then outsource that labor to Dafen in order to execute their ideas because it’s efficient.

Vivian Le:
And Eddie thinks that there’s actually something creative and undervalued happening in the mass manufacturing of oil paintings at places like Dafen. He decided to blur the line between production and art even further by incorporating the Dafen copying process into his artwork

Eddie Colla:
I mean, part of the reason I want to go back to Dafen is because there are so many possibilities about what you could do as an artist.

Vivian Le:
Eddie visited Dafen back in 2018 while he was doing an artist residency based in Shenzhen and while he was there he decided to conduct a bit of an artistic experiment. He had a graphic that he had designed–it was an image of a woman staring straight forward, sort of like in a passport photo. Aside from some red text running down the sides, it’s a pretty monochromatic image, kind like something from an edgy graphic novel. He chose a Dafen painter randomly and asked him to copy the graphic as an oil painting. About a week later, he got a message that his painting was ready… then repeated the process, asking another painter to make a copy of that copy.

Eddie Colla:
I went to pick it up and then just basically walked 20 or 30 feet down the street. And handed the second painter the first copy. “So can you copy this picture?” And he’s like, “Sure.”

Vivian Le:
He did this every week for seven weeks, each time bringing the newest copy of the copy of the image, until he was left with six different paintings that all built upon the last version.

Eddie Colla:
And so the whole point of the process was, you know, how does the idea of copying something over and over again change? And it does. The last painting compared to the original painting are completely different.

Vivian Le:By the sixth painting, the image had changed in a ton of obvious and beautiful ways. While the first painting was muted and somber, the 6th and final painting is exploding with color. The subject of the painting even looks like a different person.

Roman Mars:
One thing that’s overlooked about oil paintings produced in Dafen is that they are not exact copies. Every painting is actually unique because it is done by hand. We just tend to focus on the similarities and not the differences.

Vivian Le:
Eddie sees this project as a reflection of greater Shenzhen–a place that’s been criticized by the West for copycat culture, when in fact, copying is an essential part of the artistic process. Or really, any learning process for that matter. In his interpretation, the “real” art can’t exist without the “fake” art.

Eddie Colla:
We always start copying, in fact, that’s how learning works. If you learn to play an instrument, they teach you how to play existing songs. They don’t say, well, write the original composition. And so I think that’s exactly the way all things evolve.

[MUSIC]

Vivian Le:Dafen labor has been used in a lot of different ways.

[DOORBELL]

[ROMAN MARS: HOLD ON A SECOND…]

Vivian Le:
When the West demanded affordable masterpieces, Dafen painters made them. When China wanted original works of art, Dafen created them… when professional artists needed skilled labor, Dafen supplied it.

[ROMAN MARS: OKAY SO I HAVE THIS PACKAGE FROM CHINA… IT’S ABOUT 2 ½ FT BY 1 ½ FT… TO ROMAN MARS….]

Vivian Le:
And when I reached out to a painting company in Dafen and asked them to create something truly absurd…

[ROMAN MARS: THIS IS A PICTURE OF ME HOLDING A MICROPHONE…]

Vivian Le:
Which was an oil painting of my boss doing karaoke at a staff retreat… they really delivered.
And, honestly, it was worth every penny.

[ROMAN MARS: NOW THAT IS ART RIGHT THERE!]

Roman Mars:
Vivian comes back to tell me about a curious by-product of China’s rapid urbanization — villages in the middle of the city… after this.

[BREAK]

Vivian Le:
How’s the painting? Where did you put it?

Roman Mars:
It is in the closet. We have this walk-in closet, on Joy’s side. So like when she’s getting ready in the morning, there’s just like this oil coming to me, like crooning at her, you know? And it’s this kind of funny inside joke for us. But every once in a while, if somebody’s like, I don’t know, coming by and they haven’t been to the house — because people haven’t been in the house very much.

Vivian Le:
Yeah.

Roman Mars:
So you give them a tour or whatever. And then you realize that there’s this oil painting of your own face, like in the closet and they kind of… walk away…

Vivian Le:
Yeah, man, this… “Roman’s really entered a megalomaniac phase. I guess he’s got this painting of his face.”

Roman Mars:
It freaks out the kids a little bit. It has a very fun effect on the household. So I’m assuming you don’t want to just talk about the oil painting of my face in the house. There’s something in the research that didn’t make it into the story.

Vivian Le:
Yes, yes! You monsters actually cut it out of the script, but I really wanted to talk about urban villages — this thing called urban villages — because Dafen is sort of both a good and a bad example of one.

Roman Mars:
So what exactly is an urban village?

Vivian Le:
Yeah. So there’s this very fascinating urban design phenomenon that came out of the rapid development of Shenzhen. So this also happens outside of Shenzhen, but I’m just going to focus there because we’re already there.

Roman Mars:
That makes sense.

Vivian Le:
But you know, if you were to look at Shenzhen today, it is like a gigantic mega city full of towering skyscrapers, technology parks and these big open city blocks that were, you know, centrally planned and are managed by the government. So for the most part, it looks like this cohesive, you know, even futuristic metropolis. I’ve actually dropped a photo below to give you an idea of what it looks like from.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing. Like multicolored, fancy glass. It looks like a future city.

Vivian Le:
Yeah, exactly. But you know, when I say that it’s cohesive, for the most part, it’s because scattered throughout the city are these small pockets of neighborhoods that actually disrupt the urban fabric of modern Shenzhen in this really interesting way. And these neighborhoods are the urban villages.

Roman Mars:
So what do you mean by disrupt? Like, what do they look like?

Vivian Le:
So they’re essentially these blocks within the city that developed entirely differently from the rest of centrally planned Shenzhen. Like I mentioned that most of the city is composed of giant steel and glass skyscrapers that seem super modern with these wide streets. But urban villages are these incredibly dense neighborhoods packed with multi-story apartment buildings divided by very narrow alleyways. And you can instantly tell that the same building codes do not apply in these places as the rest of Shenzhen because the apartment buildings, they’re way smaller, like three to 10 stories tall. But they’re just so densely built next to each other, like they’re so densely packed that they’re actually called “handshake buildings” because supposedly you could reach your arm out the window and shake the hand of the person in the next building.

Roman Mars:
Whoa. Okay. You’re talking very, very close.

Vivian Le:
Yes. Very, very close together. So these apartments are also mixed-use so people might live in the floors above and then down below, there’s like– it’s like bustling with markets and shops and restaurants and schools. And I actually have another picture of the meeting point between an urban village and the rest of the city.

Roman Mars:
Okay, so we’re looking at a sort of top-down view of, you know, buildings surrounding, like, tall buildings surrounding and then a real mishmash-hodgepodge of buildings at different angles and different heights. And it really is very, very different. It’s just like this informal enclave like enveloped by, you know, square angle rest of the city. So you mentioned that the building codes are different. I mean, are they just regulated completely differently than the rest of Shenzhen?

Vivian Le:
Yeah. So while most of Shenzhen is managed by the government, these urban villages are owned and managed by village collectives, which is why, you know, the same building codes don’t apply to them and why their development almost looks improvisational compared to the rest of the city.

Roman Mars:
Huh. So if the rest of Shenzhen was so meticulously planned, how did urban villages, you know, come about?

Vivian Le:
If you were to go back to the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in 1980, you know, Shenzhen was chosen as the location for a number of reasons. But a key reason was because it was this very rural area with a lot of farmland prior to the 1980s. So it was much more sparsely populated, but there were still, you know, tens of thousands of people who lived there prior to the SEZ. These are people that we call, you know, “original villagers.” And it’s kind of interesting because people tend to hype up the idea that Shenzhen was built from nothing and it was a blank slate prior to Shenzhen SEZ and, you know, it’s spring forth because of, you know, capitalism or whatever. But, you know, the presence of the original villagers actually had this huge impact on, you know, the development of the SEZ.

Roman Mars:
In what way did they have an impact?

Vivian Le:
When Shenzhen was selected as a location of the first SEZ, the government bought up all of that vast, uninhabited farmland. But it did not purchase the plots of land that the original villagers actually built their homes on — meaning the actual village community land where the houses were.

Roman Mars:
Oh, why not? It seems like that’s the thing you do.

Vivian Le:
Apparently, it was just like too expensive to buy that land and relocate the actual people. So the government just let them stay and manage those plots of land themselves and then built the rest of Shenzhen around these villages. So these villages literally became surrounded by skyscrapers.

Roman Mars:
Oh, okay. So they really predate everything and they just built around them. It was actually like, I don’t know, it’s kind of a good sign. They didn’t just move them and bulldoze them. So much of world history is built on that premise, that it’s kind of a nice, I don’t know, change of pace.

Vivian Le:
Yeah, it’s shockingly nice. It’s surprisingly nice, just given the history.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. So how did these urban villages grow to what they look like today? Because I can’t imagine the original houses and villages that used to occupy the space looked like this. I mean, they look like urbanized areas. They just look like a different kind of urbanization than the skyscrapers around them.

Vivian Le:
Yes, exactly. So, you know, the original villagers, they didn’t have this farmland to make a living off anymore after the creation of the SEZ, but there was this huge opportunity because they had their hands on this prime real estate that was in the middle of a very rapidly growing city. So what the original villagers ended up doing is they formed village collectives to manage the land, and then they tore down their houses that were there and then constructed these really dense, multi-story apartment buildings to rent out to, like the millions of new migrants that were flocking to Shenzhen for job opportunities.

Roman Mars:
Wow. So they really just bought into the whole like, we’re going to become a capitalist economy, right?

Vivian Le:
Yeah, they just leaned right into it.

Roman Mars:
Okay, good. Good for them.

Vivian Le:
Yeah. But like the remarkable thing about urban villages is that, you know, spatially they only make up a small part of the city. But by the year 2000, they housed essentially half of the population of Shenzhen.

Roman Mars:
Oh, my god. That doesn’t compute from the pictures I see. That’s really, really insane. So these are really dense. Like people are really packed on top of each other. And it makes it seem also that those buildings surrounding these urban villages are not very dense, like they don’t have enough housing for people.

Vivian Le:
Yeah, exactly. So urban villages basically became some of the only affordable housing options for a lot of migrant workers in Shenzhen. So, you know, for a lot of new low income residents, you have like students, restaurant workers, construction workers, factory workers, basically blue collar workers. Urban villages are, you know, the first stops when trying to find housing in Shenzhen because it’s a very expensive city and because you can find all of these different types of people and different types of shops and resources condensed into one small area, urban villages are, you know, full of life and really have become the center of a lot of culture.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, nothing is more dead than some dumb business district. Tall buildings, right?

Vivian Le:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, earlier when I said that Dafen is a good and a bad example of an urban village, you know, it’s a good example because it’s a similarly dense, multi-use neighborhood that developed in this very different way from the rest of Shenzhen. But it’s also a bad example, because Dafen was a place that was given a lot of special treatment and attention by the government because it already had this flourishing painting industry. So Dafen was allocated money to modernize its infrastructure. But urban villages on the whole are not places that get a lot of respect.

Roman Mars:
And what do you mean by that?

Vivian Le:
So because these are spaces that are accessible to the poor, urban villages are often associated with, you know, overcrowding shoddy construction. They’re also linked with drug use and seen as dangerous areas. Of course, it’s been debated how much of that reputation is just classism. So urban villages, especially in the last couple of decades, have been targeted for “urban renewal,” and a lot of them have been torn down and redeveloped into more modern housing that more closely fits into that master plan for the rest of the city. But when urban villages get demolished, like hundreds of thousands of people get displaced from their homes.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I definitely can recognize that maybe urban villages have their problems, but, you know, not having affordable housing in the center of large city is a problem that all cities seem to have. Like, they just seem to push low-wage workers that work in the city and serve people’s needs further and further away and have to commute. And it just makes life harder for the people that we rely on — these people that, you know, we call essential workers at this point because of the pandemic. It’s just it’s really awful to see that happen everywhere.

Vivian Le:
Yeah, yeah, that’s totally right. And you know, I think it’s really important in the case of urban villages, it’s really important to understand how important they’ve been to Shenzhen’s success. I spoke with a professor of architecture and urban design named Juan Du, who actually has written extensively about Shenzhen. And, you know, she said that if you were to think about it from an ecological point of view, she compared urban villages to the wetlands of the city because they’ve provided all of this overlooked support to, you know, its overall health and development.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. I mean, these interstitial places where people have a little bit more freedom to solve problems and create the spaces that they need to live and become little places to experiment exactly like, you know, creating the healthy ecology with lots of different, you know, like niches being fulfilled and represented. I mean, not everyone can live in a gleaming downtown skyscraper.

Vivian Le:
Yeah, yeah, totally. I know that firsthand.

Roman Mars:
Well, this is fascinating stuff. I mean, I just… I’m so intrigued by these places. They’re very cinematic. And I think they are a little odd to us, you know, in different ways. But they serve this vital purpose of figuring out like how people actually need to live, and it’s important to pay attention to what services they provide. But it’s a fascinating space, and it’s… I’d love to hear more about them. I can’t believe, you know, as monsters told you not to talk about this in the piece. It’s super fascinating stuff. Well, thanks for bringing this little extra information to us. I really appreciate it.

Vivian Le:
Thank you for letting me rant about it.

———

CREDITS

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivian Le. Edited by Emmett FitzGerald. Mix and tech production by Martín Gonzales. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Music by our director of sound Swan Real with additional music by Jenny Conlee Drizos, Jon Neufeld, and Nate Query.

Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Sofia Klatzker and me, Roman Mars.

Special thanks this week to Low Tze Wee and Juan Du whose interviews did not make it into the piece, but if you want to read more about the complexities of Shenzhen’s special economic zone, Juan wrote a great book about called “The Shenzhen Experiment: ​​The Story of China’s Instant City.” You should check it out.
We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building — in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.
You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi…. And also pictures of that creepy oil painting that Viv had commissioned of my face at 99pi.org.