Country Driving [207]
She lived with her boyfriend, another artist named Hu Jianhui, and together they ran the Bomia gallery. They had hired a couple of young art school graduates to work with them. Every month or so, Jianhui packed up a bundle of paintings and took a train to Dongguan, a city in the far south. Dongguan has a market that specializes in such paintings, and most of Jianhui’s customers came from Europe and Russia. They paid according to size: an 8 x 10 usually went for $6.25, a 12 x 16 was $12.50, a 30 x 40 was $45.11. In the average month, Meizi and Jianhui earned a total of a thousand dollars, which is excellent money for Lishui. Among technicians in the factory world, only a Big Master can earn so much.
One afternoon I hung out in their studio while they painted. The conversation turned to taste, and Jianhui talked about things he noticed from the art market. “Americans prefer brighter pictures,” he said. “They like scenes to be lighter. Russians like bright colors, too. Koreans like them to be more subdued, and Germans like things that are grayer. The French are like that, too.”
Meizi flipped through a book that displayed sample landscapes, and she pointed to a clumsily exotic scene of palm trees on a beach. “Chinese people like this kind of picture,” she said. “It’s stupid, something a child would like. Chinese people have no taste. French people have the best taste, followed by the Russians and then the other Europeans, and the Americans are after that. We’ll do a painting and the European customer won’t buy it, and then we’ll show it to a Chinese person, and he’ll say, ‘Great!’”
Sometimes the artists received commissions in the form of photographs that were to be reproduced in oil paint. That week an American had sent a bunch of snapshots, and Meizi showed me one: a big white barn with two silos. I asked her what she thought it was.
“A development zone,” she said.
I told her it was a farm. “So big just for a farm?” she said. “What are those for?”
I said the silos are used for grain.
“Those big things are for grain?” she said, laughing. “I thought they were for storing chemicals!”
Now she studied the scene with new eyes. “I can’t believe how big it is!” she said. “Where’s the rest of the village?”
I told her that American farmers don’t usually live in a town.
“Where are their neighbors?” Meizi asked.
“They’re probably far away, too,” I said.
“Aren’t they lonely?”
“It doesn’t bother them,” I said. “That’s how farming is in America.”
She showed me the rest of the photos, which consisted mostly of shopfronts and old buildings that appeared to come from an American small town. Meizi couldn’t tell me anything else about the commission—it had come through a middleman who didn’t want to reveal the final buyer. From reading the shop signs and checking online, I learned that all the featured buildings were located in Park City, Utah. At first I thought they must be connected with some local tourist campaign, but when I contacted people in Park City they had no idea that their homes and businesses were being painted in the Chinese Barbizon. Probably somebody had passed through northern Utah with a camera, taken some quick snapshots, and commissioned the paintings. Most likely they would be sold as decorations for hotel rooms or restaurants; the final destination could be anywhere in America or Europe.
The shop signs in the photographs caused the biggest headache for the artists, who didn’t speak English. Meizi had painted a building with a sign in front: “Miners Hospital 1904.” In her picture, the building looked perfect, but the sign now read: “Miers Hospital 1904.” Meizi had turned another shop, “Fine Sheepskin Leather Since 1973,” into “Fine Sheepskim Leather Sine 1773.” A “Bar” was now a “Dah.