Country Driving [206]
The cadres named their project the Ancient Weir Art Village, and they claimed to have modeled it on the Barbizon, the nineteenth-century movement that first developed near the forest of Fontainebleau in France, where artists gathered to paint rural scenes and peasant subjects. In the Barbizon spirit, the Lishui government commissioned a series of landscapes of the surrounding countryside. They built a gallery to display these paintings, and not long after it opened I made a visit. I wandered through the gallery, gazing at scenes from the region: a bucolic stretch of the Da River, a quiet hillside of tangerine groves, a picturesque cluster of traditional peasant homes. Most paintings were heavily influenced by French Impressionism, with muted colors and soft light; some of the details even seemed European. One picture featured three languid cows, an animal I never saw in Lishui. Another painting used Van Gogh–style brushstrokes to depict a tangerine tree. There was a Monet-inspired scene of a local chaff fire. In the gallery’s main room, out of twenty-six landscapes, only one included a human figure. It was exactly how Lishui would look if it were located in France and had no people.
The Ancient Weir Art Village had just opened, but its promise of free rent had already attracted eleven art companies. Most of these small businesses employed painters who created European and American cityscapes destined for the overseas market. They had been trained in art schools across Zhejiang, and a number of them specialized in reproducing portraits of Venice. One of the biggest local companies was called Hong Ye, where a manager told me that they dealt with a European buyer who wanted a thousand paintings of Venice every month. Back in Europe, these canvases were sold to tourist shops, hotels, and restaurants. There was also a good market for paintings copied from the work of Dutch Masters. Chinese artists called these scenes Helan Jie, “Holland Street,” and usually it took them a little more than a day to turn one out.
At a gallery called Bomia, I watched a woman named Chen Meizi work on a “Holland Street.” The scene featured cobblestones, a horse-drawn cart, and a building she referred to as “the tower.” When I told Meizi it was actually a church, she said she had suspected as much but wasn’t certain. She estimated that she had already painted this particular scene thirty times. Her other most common subjects were Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace, although she didn’t know the names of either building. Like other local artists, she referred to Venice as Shuicheng, “Water City.” Originally she had grown up on a farm in another part of Zhejiang, and I asked how she first became interested in art.
“Because I was a terrible student,” Meizi said. “I had bad grades and I couldn’t get into high school. It’s easier to get accepted to an art school than a technical school, so that’s what I did.”
“Did you like to draw when you were little?”
“No,” she said.
“But you had natural talent, right?”
“Absolutely none at all!” she said. “When I started, I couldn’t even hold a brush!”
“Did you study well?”
“No. I was the worst in the class.”
“But did you enjoy it?”
“No. I didn’t like it one bit.”
To my eye, Meizi seemed technically quite capable; her paintings looked good. But she spoke of her work without the slightest sentimentality. Chinese people tend to be blunt about such matters, especially if they’re from the countryside, and often it’s refreshing. A young American who doodles for an ad company might expound on creativity and inspiration—if only the company would let me follow my muse! But Meizi had no use for any of that. She was a petite, pretty woman with a raspy voice; she wore a white painter’s smock and laughed at many of my questions. She never painted anything for fun—when I mentioned the possibility, she looked at me like I was crazy. She mocked the Barbizon concept; as with most young migrants, the last thing she wanted was rural tranquillity, and she had moved to Dagangtou strictly