In a farming county in Heze, tens of thousands of farmers paint peonies in the meticulous “gongbi” fine-brush style during the agricultural off-season. About 80% of all the peony paintings sold in China come from Juye, and they now ship to more than 100 countries.
Juye is an ordinary farming county of about a million people in Heze, and it is the hometown of fine-brush painting in China. More than 28,000 people here paint, most of them farmers working in the off-season, and together they produce over 1.5 million paintings a year. Official figures put Juye at roughly 80% of all the peony paintings sold in China, an industry now worth several billion yuan with sales to more than 100 countries.
Two local facts meet here. Heze is the peony capital of China, where the national flower, a symbol of wealth and prosperity, has been grown for over a thousand years. And gongbi (工笔) is one of China's oldest painting styles, a meticulous fine-brush realism that goes back to the Sui and Tang dynasties. Juye married the region's signature flower to an ancient technique, and turned it into a livelihood.
It began with one man. Yao Guiyuan painted at a Juye arts-and-crafts factory in the 1970s and lost the work when it closed in the early 1980s. In 2009 he returned to his village, opened a painting cooperative, taught his neighbours to paint and found buyers for their work. Over half the households in his village joined; the craft spread county-wide. A skilled painter can now earn 60,000 to 100,000 yuan a year, and a single fine work can fetch anywhere from a hundred yuan to tens of thousands.
Juye's farmer-painters have reached surprising stages. Their giant peony canvases have hung at the SCO Qingdao Summit and at the first China International Import Expo in Shanghai, where one fifteen-metre work bloomed 130 peonies for the 130 countries attending. The county is now building the full chain around the craft, training, creation, exhibition and trade, with the stated ambition of becoming a recognised “Chinese painting town.”
China has two famous painting towns, and they are opposites. Dafen, an urban village in Shenzhen, mass-produces Western oil reproductions, Van Goghs and Monets by the container, painted by migrant workers on an assembly line. Juye produces traditional Chinese gongbi peonies, painted by farmers in a rural county. Same idea, a place that paints for the world, but drawn from opposite ends of art history.