Special Report: Shanghai World Expo 2010
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| The giant Mona Lisa reproduction has been named Dafen Lisa by the design team. (Photo: Chinadaily.com.cn) |
BEIJING, May 21 -- Dafen has village grown into the world center of art reproduction, China Daily's Li Xinzhu reports.
As copies of the Mona Lisa go, you don't get them much bigger than this. Nor does it usually take so many painters to recreate the masterpiece. And just to make the project even more bizarre, this version of the Mona Lisa sits horizontally on the side of a building.
More than 500 artists from the village of Dafen, near the city of Shenzhen in Guangdong province, created a 43-meter-long by 7-meter-high Mona Lisa in 999 individual paintings, all of which have been set into the faade of the Shenzhen city Case Pavilion in the Urban Best Practices Area (UBPA) of the Expo Garden.
The artwork is one of 16 exhibits brought by Shenzhen city to the Expo 2010 Shanghai to its Case Pavilion in the UBPA - were innovative practices of cities around the world dedicated to improving urban life are on show.
Dafen village has become famous as an artists' village, where thousands of artists toil reproducing famous painting for a worldwide market.
The village was once a typical small urban village in Shenzhen with only 300 people. But all that changed in the late 1980s with the arrival of an art dealer from Hong Kong. The dealer rented houses in the village to store his paintings and began recruiting painters to fill orders from overseas customers for world famous oil paintings .
