Winnie Wong – författare

In the Guangdong province in southeastern China lies Dafen, a village that houses thousands of workers who paint Van Goghs, Da Vincis, Warhols, and other Western masterpieces, producing an astonishing five million paintings a year. To write about life and work in Dafen, Winnie Wong infiltrated this world, investigating the claims of conceptual artists who made projects there; working as a dealer; apprenticing as a painter; surveying merchants in Europe, Asia, and America; establishing relationships with local leaders; and organizing a conceptual art show for the Shanghai World Expo. The result is Van Gogh on Demand, a fascinating book about a little-known aspect of the global art world - one that sheds surprising light on our understandings of art, artists, and individual genius. Confronting difficult questions about the definition of art, the ownership of an image, and the meaning of imitation and appropriation, Wong shows how a plethora of artistic practices joins Chinese migrant workers, propaganda makers, and international artists together in a global supply chain of art and creativity.She examines how Berlin-based conceptual artist Christian Jankowski, who collaborated with Dafen's painters to reimagine the Dafen Art Museum, unwittingly appropriated a photojournalist's intellectual property. She explores how Zhang Huan, a radical performance artist from Beijing's East Village, prompted propaganda makers to heroize the female artists of Dafen village. Through these cases, Wong shows how Dafen's workers force us to reexamine our expectations about the cultural function of creativity and imitation, and the role of Chinese workers in redefining global art. Providing a valuable account of art practices in a period of profound global cultural shifts and an ascendant China, Van Gogh on Demand is a rich and detailed look at the implications of a world that can offer countless copies of everything that has ever been called "art."

Explores how the function, norms, and meaning of artists’ names in Chinese modernity have been misunderstood.  Challenging contemporary procedures for establishing attribution, chronology, and authenticity in Chinese art, Winnie Wong explores the means, methods, and stakes of recovering the names of an anonymous community of artists. To examine how Western art history has misconstrued and miscategorized names and identities in Chinese art, she looks to conflicting features of modernity: the European attachment of singular names to individuals and their works, and the Chinese use of socially contingent names that often are not attached to material labor and sometimes operate against it. Wong charts the genealogy of this naming problem by bringing to life the artists of the Qing Empire’s trade with Europeans at the port of Guangzhou, centering on a group of portraitists known by names that were recorded in a pidgin language: Chin Qua, Chit Qua, Spoilum, Lam Qua, and Ting Qua.  Many of these paintings survive today, yet scholars have identified only a handful of the painters’ identities. Pushing against Western norms that have shaped our understanding of authorship, Wong reveals that these artists shared names, created works in multiples, and signed their pieces with different names or none at all. This lavishly illustrated volume explores portraiture across media, including unfired clay, reverse painting on glass, watercolor on paper, oil on canvas, and the daguerreotype, to propose new ways of studying anonymity, copying, and the emergence of author names in the Sino-European visual culture of the long eighteenth century.

This multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China's contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China's special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China's emerging technology industries. Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world's most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.

Tanzania is a home to spectacular sights like the Serengeti plains and Mount Kilimanjaro. Its rich wildlife population has led to conservation efforts, but also has allowed for more sinister workings to occur, such as poaching. Readers will learn about the country''s past and present through vibrant photographs and rich text that examine Tanzania''s unique features, including its people, heritage, geography, environment, and food, offering a comprehensive view of the country today.

Our planet is large, vast, and filled with an amazing array of unique countries and cultures. With this book, students can explore one such place, the young nation of Latvia, which hugs the Baltic Sea. Vibrant photographs, detailed maps, and engaging text combine to give readers an inside look at this country, its history, its people, and all the opportunities that lie within it. Once a part of the USSR, Latvia has been through immense changes in recent years. Readers will be riveted by the exciting stories and images in this book.

This book provides the in-depth information, exercises, and worksheets that will provide readers with the tools to become successful, enlightened filmmakers. Most novices are unaware of the “business” aspects of the film world or that producing Hollywood films will involve contracts, budget constraints, personnel, scheduling, legal issues, insurance, and safety regulations. Many first time filmmakers spend all their time on their “creative endeavors” and often forget to establish production management strategies or consider business ethics as integral parts of the process. In many cases the result is litigation or insurance problems that can lead to financial hardship and/or the inability to distribute the film. The book includes a companion CD-ROM containing the forms and documents covered in the text. Solutions to exercises and PowerPoint slides are available to instructors.