When Winnie Wong visited Dafen Oil Painting Village in China for the first time in 2006, her expectations were shaped by media portrayals. As a graduate student at MIT, she had read about Dafen as a hub where thousands of artists produced replicas of well-known paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” to be exported mainly to Europe and the United States.

“We had an expectation, which was that there would be this giant factory, and in this factory there would be these painters working in an assembly-line fashion,” said Wong, now a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California Berkeley. “One person would paint the rocks, one person would paint the trees, one person would paint the sky.”

Instead of large-scale assembly lines, Wong found small studios and workshops where artists worked independently or in groups no larger than three. The number of paintings each artist produced varied significantly; some could complete 25 works per day while others finished just one per week.

Wong’s research focused on Dafen but she noted similar art reproduction industries exist globally—in countries such as Italy, South Korea, Brazil, and even locations across the United States.

In 2013, Wong published "Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade," which explored Western perceptions of Chinese manufacturing and examined stereotypes about mass production. The book also discussed her interactions with Dafen artists and how those experiences shifted her views on authenticity and creativity.

During her fieldwork in Dafen—a village-turned-production center within Shenzhen near Hong Kong—Wong encountered a range of reproduced artworks. Some were well-known pieces like da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” while others included lesser-known works or original commissions based on photographs.

After interviewing a local painter alongside two colleagues, Wong recalled being asked: “‘OK. Well, what do you think of our village?’ … And he said, ‘Well, we think it’s very nice here. And we think, for example, that it’s nicer than Paris, and we think our Mona Lisas are better. What do you think?’”

The question challenged Wong's assumptions about originality in art. “It was very, very surprising,” she said. “It really changed my mind.”

Wong spent six years researching Dafen’s artists and their relationship with global art markets—including two years apprenticing at a van Gogh studio—and interviewed around 200 painters from among the roughly 6,000 believed to work in the industry according to government figures.

Most Dafen painters are considered illicit migrants from rural areas without official urban residency status. Their backgrounds varied widely; some had little formal education or exposure to art training while others held university-level arts degrees.

Wong observed that attitudes toward copying also differed greatly among artists—some saw their work as commercial promotion akin to Andy Warhol's approach; others pursued artistic ambitions or simply sought stable income.

“For some of them, it was art,” said Wong. “For some of them, it was not.”

She found parallels between celebrated artists and accused forgers regarding their approaches to defining art: “There is much greater similarity between the most successful artists and the most accused forger than we can imagine,” said Wong. “Particularly in the way they think about and relate to the question of: What is art?”

At UC Berkeley over the past decade, Wong has taught courses examining imitation and forgery across history—including cases involving artist Zhang Daqian—encouraging students to investigate scandals involving copying across fields such as fashion or social media.

“This phenomenon of not only reproducing the work of an artist but a person … that was an interesting scandal,” said Wong about one case involving identity imitation online. She added: “I’m just constantly learning from my students that there is just no shortage of very opposing views about … ‘copying’ that take on really complex dimensions.”

As artificial intelligence advances allow users easier access to mimic existing works across mediums—a development raising questions about creativity—Wong draws comparisons between current debates over AI-generated content and earlier anxieties over globalization and outsourcing manufacturing jobs abroad.

“In the history of forgery, this is a constant kind of aesthetic question—a philosophical question,” said Wong. “After you find out something is a forgery ... You somehow cannot undo it in your mind and experience the painting like you did before.”

In 2015 during an interdisciplinary research project at UC Berkeley led by herself and architecture professor Margaret Crawford with graduate students studying urban art villages around China’s Pearl River Delta region (including Dafen), participants later exhibited their findings through multimedia presentations both on campus and abroad.

Following shifts after economic changes such as those brought by the 2008 financial crisis—which led international demand for replica paintings from places like Dafen to fall while domestic demand rose along with China’s property market—the community continues facing uncertainty amid recent downturns affecting local economies.

“When I saw it in 2015 it was still very active but it was different,” said Wong regarding changes witnessed during her return visit.

Research conditions have become more difficult due to increasing political tensions between China and other countries combined with heightened censorship domestically; according to Wong these factors make conducting fieldwork today much harder than before.

Reflecting on public perceptions toward replicas versus originals—and how knowledge influences appreciation—Wong described observing contrasting reactions among visitors viewing copies displayed for sale: English-speaking teachers lost interest upon learning they viewed replicas while construction workers engaged deeply with what they knew were copies yet still found meaning discussing van Gogh’s legacy.

“At any other given moment either one of these paintings could have been thought of as a forgery or as an imitation or as an appropriation or as a replica or as any number of things,” she said.

Ultimately for Wong bearing witness to conversations sparked by these works holds more significance than rigidly categorizing them by authenticity: Maybe bearing witness to these moments when thoughts about art are made in real time is actually much more interesting than adhering to certain static ideas about what art is—or isn’t.