User:JoeHK247/sandbox-Yoon



"There are two sides to every story" - Book 25 NA 6665 L10

Story
She is an artist from Dafen who recently moved to the Wushipu Oil Painting Village in Xiamen. While in art school, she studied traditional Chinese watercolors. However after graduating, she was unable to find buyers for her original work. Like many of her classmates, she found that the only way to support herself through art was by painting replicas of famous western paintings. Even then, she wanted to be the best at what she did, and being the best meant copying the most famous work of art in the world, the Mona Lisa. An enigmatic face that has borne the burden of centuries of projected thoughts and fantasies. A painting whose history has been perpetually re-imagined, rewritten and appropriated by numerous authors poets, politicians and activists. The subject of countless myths and stories, false, real and fictional, the Mona Lisa has been frequently copied and parodied by artists and art movements, only adding to its fame and popularity. So why not should it not be copied again? It can take her less than half a day to paint an accurate copy to almost complete perfection, yet recently she has been spending weeks on each piece. (Each time she paints the Mona Lisa's face, the eyes are a noticeably different shade of brown. While most people seem to fixate on the mysterious smile, her obsession is with the eyes. Frustrated, she can't get the color right: she paints them again, layering burnt ochre and sienna in search of the right combination of amber eyes.) She studies x-ray scans posted online of the painting in the Louvre to accurately replicate the technique and order of Leonardo's painting, including his imperfections into her own. She studies the Isleworth and Prado versions of the Mona Lisa, and she begins to question the identity and authenticity of the work in hanging in the Louvre and the nature of originality in itself.

She asks herself what she knows is a stupid question. What makes the painting in the Louvre worth so much more than the painting she has recreated so perfectly? The painting is worth nothing without the myths and controversies that surround it, but a contemporary obsession with verifiable authenticity preserves its existence as an artifact and perpetuates its reproduction as an image. A similar legitimization is sought after by many of her clients, who unable to purchase the real symbols of status and wealth, have instead commissioned her to reproduce expensive copies of the famous renaissance paintings to place above the plaster peeling off the mantle of their gas fireplaces in the leaky living rooms of their shoddily constructed Italian villas. Without their own traditional symbols of wealth and prestige, the new Chinese aristocracy has resorted to adopting European models, though at a purely symbolic level that seems ignorant of the craftsmanship and architectural legacy involved. But like the triglyphs and metopes on the cornice of a doric temple from Ancient Greece, the replicated Chinese villas have become ornamentalized and disassociated from their original structural purpose. Maybe at some point far in the future, with time and age the naive and imperfect construction of these Chinese copies could themselves become the subject of new copies, attempting to recreate a prestige surrounding those then ancient buildings which had once themselves failed to emulate another.

In not much time, the tastes of the Chinese upper and middle classes have shifted from classical Renaissance works to an appetite for Minimalist Dutch and Abstract American Art. Her client orders 300 copies of a series by Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg. The work is straightforward and honest. She draws a grid. She paints with three colors - Red Yellow Blue; Stop wait ... De Stijl. She paints some more and finds a simple formula. Its easy and she can paints her own compositions; they ship out the next day hidden among the other replicas. Another order, this time a mural by Sol Lewitt, a wall and a set of instructions. Business is good. She starts to make furniture too. Now a Rietvelt chair: soon a Schröder House.

With the money she opens her own studio and begins hiring artists to do her work. She manages her employees work and searches for clients. She no longer paints the Mona Lisa, or anything for that matter. With her free time she designs the studio. The studio becomes a scaled magnification of her painted work, an intersection of lines, columns, planes and frames - a three dimensional mural that contains spaces for painting, sculpture, living quarters and a showroom. The curious form of the studio becomes a landmark, attracting both tourists and serious clients. Yes business is good but she is not without competition. Seeing the success of her studio business model, some of her peers and former employees have collaborated to form a rival art studio, across the water from Xiamen on the mainland in the Haicang Oil Painting Village. Their studio is a half-scale replica of her's operating to compete for the same market of replica artworks. She considers pursuing legal action against them, but thinks over the irony of suing the studio for copyright infringement when her business is built on producing and selling counterfeit works of art. No, she decides she won't sue them. The two studios will both continue to exist side by side. The design of her studio is itself an imperfect copy of the Schröder House. And anyways, she feels flattered that someone would find her work worth of copying. In her opinion it almost elevates her art to the status of the original western works that she has made her livelihood copying. They're just two sides to the same story.

Her studio branches out further, expanding to work on projects that are outside the realm of "fine art". They are commissioned to produce a set of drawings of the city of Xiamen showing a proposed movie set that is built in locations around the city, based off of the stories and lives of a series of characters that were imagined in the process of translating and adapting an ancient book for both Asian and western audiences. There are about a dozen different sites and designs for the sets that her employees illustrate. She personally designs and illustrates two of them, copying the form of her own studio to feature in the drawings for the film sets. Is it still copying if you're copying yourself?