When a film provokes
thoughts after watching “China’s Van Goghs”
We watched a film screening at the National Gallery about China’s factory-line artists who spent their lives toiling to reproduce famous paintings. I expected a reporter-style documentary, and ended up crying multiple times throughout the screening.
(Some spoilers ahead)
The beginning of the film made me uncomfortable, as the camera panned around the conditions these artists live with as they produce painting after painting, day after day. They live in cramped quarters sleeping on floor mats. I am reminded yet again about the injustice of this world, how our lives are all determined by an ovarian lottery. I think about my privilege, the array of choices I am afforded with. Here I am having a deep inquiry about my existence on a comfortable, supposedly bargain-cheap $200 foam mattress.
We get more invested in the emotional life of the protagonist as the film rolls on. He talks about his dream to visit the Van Gogh museum, to see the authentic paintings just once. He literally dreams about it. My assumption that these artworks are mind-numbingly produced in a line is broken. It turns out that these copy-cat artists love Van Gogh even though their circumstances and timelines cannot be more different — a point made even more poignant when the camera catches their tearful silence during a communal film screening when they watched the ending of Lust for Life.
I feel his world expanding and shattering during his visit to Amsterdam. His stunned silence when he saw his paintings being sold for 10x more. How surreal it felt to see him painting the same cafe scene that Van Gogh did in France, surrounded by admiring locals. They held late night conversations on how Van Gogh gave it all for his art, whereas for them, they paint out of economic necessity. The irony in the similarity how they were both driven by necessity but a different expression of it; that they are separated by time, geography and culture but how universal can the love of art be.
Zhao Xiaoyong learned how to paint Van Gogh replicas by watching television and looking at books. His artists and himself seem to paint from memory, occasionally referencing a postcard-sized photo. His business has reproduced more than 100,000 paintings.
I feel very much: the disproportionate amount of talent contrasted with the economic outcome.
There are times in our lives when we finish a film and our world feels different, no matter the scale of the magnitude.
I have a form of survivor’s guilt: that despite my perpetual existential crisis I am still a winner of the ovarian lottery. I feel guilty that it takes being transported into another world by a filmmaker to provoke deep appreciation for what I have.
This film is a reminder of the power and responsibility of storytellers, that we owe it that much to each other to keep on trying to elevate the consciousness of other people in the ways we can.
That is how we can bear the weight of our existence — that one day it may become so unbearable that we would finally decide collectively that in order to lift it we cannot leave others behind.
