Design Free Thursday // Photos of Chinese Artists Reproducing Classical Sculptures.

Italian photographer Chiara Goia travelled to Dong Cheng, a small village in China where artists are responsible for producing imitations of renowned classical sculptures. I ache for the irony, the beauty and the bizarre nature of these images. For me, the artist’s statement below says it all:

Dong Cheng, in China, is a village where every commercial activity turns around the reproduction of more or less famous sculptures. In this context, the creators of these “fakes” assume a marginal position and then almost disappear behind the “real” authors that they copy. Even more oddly, they end up blending with the same reproductions they have been molding and portraying. Reproductions of something that is already reproducing something else. A person in most of the cases. What is “fake”? Couldn’t we define these people “artists”? Aren’t the hands and the craft of these living sculptors, who are fullfilling a very physical and tangible job, making these objects? What is the boundary between art/craft/reproduction/fake? In Dong Cheng this borderline seems to vanish and shade to the eyes. Nothing is completely legitimate, or fully illicit.

Interesting, no. What do you think?

[Images courtesy of the artist. Discovered via Designboom.]