Doc Fortnight ’25: 14 Paintings (short)

It turns out China applied the same strategies to the fine arts as they have in manufacturing. First copy, then ramp up production to enjoy economies of scale, and finally develop new innovations of their own. Viewers will likely conclude the approach worked better for electronics than on the canvases churned out in the officially designated artists’ city of Dafen. Viewers see fourteen such “products” in Dongnan Chen’s short documentary, 14 Paintings, which screens as part of MoMA’s 2025 Documentary Fortnight.

Originally, Dafen was a factory town, where painters churned out copies of Western masters, on an industrial level. Creativity was necessarily stifled. Then the state planners shifted gears, mandating artistic originality. However, it seems like they still sell in volume, given how many Dafen paintings are now displayed in commercial settings. Each of Chen’s 14 long-shots is essentially a candid tableaux, wherein almost nobody notices, let alone interacts with the art in the background.

A quote, usually from the artist (often quite telling), introduces every scene. For instance, Feng Jian makes it crystal clear who really calls China’s artistic shots when he explains how the government “asked” him to replace the PCR testing in his “Covid-Zero” themed mural Fighting the Pandemic with vaccine jabbing.

Most of the artists hardly sound wealthy. For instance, Da Su states: “rent has gone up again, so I have to paint.” Yet, his painting Imagery (one of the nicest seen in the film) hangs in the showroom apartment of a luxury skyrise. Indeed, the CCP’s crony capitalism strikes again according to the unnamed source who wrote: “The income of Dafen painters can now differ by several times of ten, and sadly half of them have been eliminated, like the painter of this piece,” referring to the anonymous painting Peach Blossom Land.

Inevitably, some of the realities of contemporary China intrude into Chen’s frame, as when a woman is captured openly discussing kickbacks on her smart phone, standing in front of Gan Xiucun’s mural, Van Gogh in Provence, which was obviously still inspired by Western sources. Yet, perhaps the greatest irony is that of Hu Jing, who remembers how his mother “grew up begging on the street and never went to school” during the Cultural Revolution, because her father was deemed a “landlord.” His painting The Triumph of 1922 Seamen’s Strike is now on display in a CCP propaganda museum.

Stylistically, 14 Paintings is not radically dissimilar to that of Wang Bing’s mammoth documentaries, but its 24-minute running time is much more economical. Regardless, Chen has eye for quiet absurdities. Frankly, this short doc might capture more truth than the crew realized during production. Recommended as a series of snapshots that together create quite a descriptive mosaic of 2020s China, 14 Paintings screens this Monday (2/24) and Thursday (2/27), as part of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight.