[Julie Steiner]

I'm interested to hear what others here think of this 1.25-hour documentary. I found the story of the subject, Zhao, and his quest to emulate his hero both disturbing and inspiring.

China's Van Goghs: The Village That Paints Thousands Of Fakes A Year | Perspective

(I wouldn't call the Van Goghs that Zhao and his studio produce "fakes." They're replicas. And copying masterpieces firsthand used to be a formal part of the training process for studio artists, so it's part of a long tradition. Not cranked out on this scale, though, and based on the originals rather than photos in books or online.)

[Jim Moonan]

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Thanks for sharing this. I've watched the first fifteen minutes and am floored. (I knew this was happening somewhere in the world but never realized the reality of it.) I'm excited to watch the rest.

In the opening minute there is a quote on the screen from a letter written by Van Gogh to his brother Theo that reads: "I'm walking toward a place that I thought was very close, but perhaps it is very far away." I don't even know what to say about that desperate disorientation that he must have felt so often. It's a gorgeous quote.

At 7:18 the narrator refers to the art reproductions they are making as "translations" which flung me down a rabbit hole......

I’ll be back. I have a thousand things this brings to mind, though nine hundred ninety-nine of them may well be answered once I watch the whole thing through : )

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[Julie Steiner]

Thanks for giving it a go, Jim. I had to watch it in several chunks, myself.

Julie Ann

[Ann Drysdale]

I've got halfway, been fascinated by the clever little boy who is always eating and keen to find out if Zhao will get to Amsterdam. Thank you for it, Julie (Ann?)

[Jim Moonan]

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I watched it twice yesterday (It was a slow day ). I loved the way the story is told. The visualness of it. The absence of a narrator. The way the camera captured everything.

But ultimately, after letting it distill, I found it to be depressing… Yes, there are moments of revelation and inspiration that bubble up, but in the end, it made me feel sad that this man, this village, invested so much time and skill to create — nothing, really. Souvenirs (Btw, I found the brief appearance of the Dutch buyers to be the nadir of the story. It brought face to face the exploitative nature of the materialist/capitalists with the dreamer victims of that exploitation. Face to face. It was devastating. But Zhao recovered, made his pilgrimage to Arles, felt the exhilaration that Van Gogh felt, visited his gravesite and had a smoke with him, and began his journey backwards to discover his own talent for painting, which was clearly miles below that of the great VanGogh’s). So it was depressing in that regard.

I found Zhao to be both admirable and maddeningly naive. How could he not realize that what he was doing was not what he thought he was doing? It also brought into focus the exploitive nature of global commerce and how it preys on the ignorant, the poor.

Ann, I can't help but think that the boy, who seems so buoyant and curious and hopeful, will not get his opportunity to study abroad and instead follow in his father's footsteps (that was the other part that devastated me. When Zhao sat alone and wept into the camera at where his life had taken him.)

Thanks for this Julie. It is a beautifully constructed documentary. It's a reminder that we have so far to go — Which reminds me of the VanGogh quote from a letter to his brother Theo that is shown at the beginning of the movie:

"I'm walking toward a place that I thought was very close, but perhaps it is very far away."


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[Julie Steiner]

Thanks for your thoughts on this, Ann and Jim.

Jim, I think Zhao's naïveté and his evangelical fervor about becoming a true artist are exactly what keep him from accepting the impossibility of bridging the gap between Van Gogh and himself.

Not that Van Gogh was a model of level-headedness about his own prospects of an artistic career, either.

Annie, I saw Zhao's cheerful son as an incarnation of his own childlike wonder.

I do find it touching that this man who had longed for education as a child—he weeps again when talking about having to enter the world of work after only one year of middle school—has stubbornly refused to stop trying to get the education of his choice, somehow. And he has tried hard to provide educational opportunities to his children—although his daughter's soul is clearly being crushed by her educational opportunities, poor thing. Again, there's a seemingly-insurmountable gap between where she is and where she needs to be in order to be successful.

Lots of weeping in this film. One of the Dutch comments in the YouTube thread translates to, "The paint dries, the tears never."

The juxtaposition of the spreading tendrils of cigarette smoke in the film projector's light and Van Gogh's "Almond Blossoms" was a bit heavy-handed, but I couldn't help liking it anyway.

Apparently there are other versions of this documentary, one of which shows several minutes of (spoiler alert, highlight this text if you want to read it): Zhao's museum visit to encounter the originals he's been reproducing for twenty years. I haven't tracked down that footage to see why what might otherwise be considered one of the climaxes of the film was cut from this version.

Another spoiler:
I thought Zhao's Van Gogh-influenced composition of the alleyway in his hometown worked very well. The paintings of Zhao's studio and of his grandmother were disappointingly mediocre, but considering that these are among his first attempts at his own original works, that shouldn't be surprising. And the discussion with his wife about the painting of his studio was charming. That one made me think of Grandma Moses's work.