Hoping amidst precarity: Changing modes of hope in the vicissitudes of a Chinese art village

Introduction

‘The layout of Dafen resembles the fruit stand of a shady vendor’, commented Zhang, ¹ an administrative official in Dafen village, the world’s largest handmade oil painting production centre. ‘What lies outside is the fresh, presentable part . . . [as can be seen in the] Dafen Art Museum where original paintings are exhibited; hidden inside is the rotten part where copies are made by the wall.’

Zhang’s remarks speak to the plight of the so-called wall painters in Dafen. Lying in the suburbs of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, the once-obscure village of Dafen is home to around 1200 galleries and 10,000 painters, with an annual gross output of approximately 40 billion RMB (Wong, 2014). Making its name in the 1990s, Dafen’s miraculous rise has brought in flocks of rural-to-urban migrant workers. Generally aged from 16 to 55 and in many cases without accredited art education, these migrant workers make their livings by replicating classic masterpieces. To overcome economic odds, some of them came up with the idea of executing and exhibiting their paintings on the outer walls of galleries, giving birth to the wall studios which would eventually grow to number over 500 (Peng & Zhang, 2017).

Despite their proliferation, these wall painters and their studios are in an awkward position in Dafen’s creative turn. While, as the world’s factory, China boasts a competitive advantage of cheap and abundant labour, it is increasingly losing this ‘global advantage’ to other emerging countries (Keane & Zhao, 2012). Since the 1990s, to boost industrial upgrading and to generate ‘soft power’, the Chinese government has promoted the creative industries (Keane & Zhao, 2012). Coinciding with this national longing to shift from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’, Dafen’s rise has led to heightened attention from the Chinese government (Wong, 2014). Designated a ‘National Model Cultural (Art) Industry Site’ in 2004, Dafen has risen to prominence in the policy discourse on creative industries as an emblem of Shenzhen’s version of the ‘China Dream’ (Wong, 2014). In Dafen’s transformation from a ‘copy village’ into an art centre, the enthusiastic promotion of its original arts has resulted in these wall painters, whose works remain predominantly replicas, being further marginalized. Conspicuously absent in official publicity, wall painters are, as shown in the opening anecdote, depicted in public narratives as manual labourers devoid of creativity.

Such perceptions are problematic: as Wong astutely points out, Dafen painters’ work conditions are not like those typical of the industrial mode of manufacture, but rather ‘exactly like the flexible, specialized, and bespoke mode of global production in which contemporary artists function’ (2014, p. 16, original emphasis). This study thus links wall painters in Dafen with the notion of precarity, a word often associated with creative workers in the West. Formulated mainly in the Global North as part of a larger discussion about post-Fordist effects in the labour market (Pettit, 2019), the concept of ‘precarity’ has become ubiquitous, defined by different scholars as a labour condition, a class category, and an ontological experience (Millar, 2017). This study approaches precarity as ‘both a socio-economic condition and an ontological experience’ (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008) to explore not only the labour regimes and political-economic structures in Dafen, but also how these material conditions shape wall painters’ subjectivities and lived experiences. Just like other types of informal employment in creative industries, being a wall painter in Dafen embodies features of the new economic paradigm, such as a decentralized workforce, fragmented working lives and informal networks (Standing, 2014). However, wall painters’ precarity encompasses a much broader swath of life than employment insecurity due to broader experiences of social and political exclusions. Being at the bottom of the global art-commodity chain, which has elaborate hierarchies of subcontractors (Wong, 2014), wall painters are faced with the lack of recognition of their labour, which leads to their struggles for artistic identity. The precarity of wall painters’ lives is further intensified by their status as rural-urban migrants. While the ‘migrant’ is, as Schierup and Jørgensen argue (2016, p. 949), the quintessential incarnation of precarity, this is especially the case in post-Mao China. To create a cheap and docile labour force, migrant workers’ access to state-sponsored welfare in urban China is limited under the hukou ² system (Pun, 2004). Naturalizing the ongoing process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization through conditioned welfare policies, such stratified and conditioned welfare policies in Dafen serve as an intensification of governance that leaves most of the risks of being a freelancer to the members of the painter community (Wang & Li, 2017). Moreover, on Dafen’s way to reinvent itself as an international art centre, the crude wall studios, with their low-price products, have become prime targets for demolition, which will be discussed in detail in a later part of the article.

Why are migrant workers attracted to the wall studios, and how do they live with such prolonged and multifaceted precarity? Drawing on the findings of a 42-month longitudinal ethnographic study, this study takes hope as a lens to understand wall painters’ everyday endurance of precarity. Focusing on this ‘atypical’ group of creative workers, this article complicates the ‘critical geography of precarity’ (Waite, 2009) by examining how precarity is experienced and negotiated in an art village in south China. Approaching precarity from an intersectional perspective, this study explicates how the multiple dimensions of precarity interact with each other in informing the shifting modes of hope. Manifesting the fluidity and contingency of wall painters’ hopes in the vicissitudes of Dafen wall studios during China’s post-industrial turn, this study further contributes to the political economy of hope in creative labour studies. In the following sections, I first discuss recent studies addressing the role of hope in the lives of creative workers. Then I discuss my research methods and data analysis. In the subsequent sections, I demonstrate how wall painters cope with the precarious present by channelling their utopian hopes for a future of freedom, original work and stability into three everyday practices: playing, creating and waiting.

Hope and creative labour

Wall painters’ informal employment, unrecognized labour, unauthorized citizenship and liminal workspaces have made them an ‘extreme case’ of creative work precarity, where hope arises ‘most easily and effectively’ (Zigon, 2009, p. 262, cited in Alacovska, 2019). Often described as an elusive, mysterious and ‘soft’ concept, hope is conceptualized in multiple ways in studies of creative industries (Cook & Cuervo, 2019). Approaching hope as a desire for utopian alternatives informed by a neoliberal governmentality, scholars have critically examined how the romanticization of creative work has led to an oversupply of creative labour despite ample evidence of insecurity, inequality and precariousness (Bennett, 2011; Gill, 2002; McRobbie, 2016). This strand of research has highlighted how utopian and therefore illusionary hope propels creative workers to invest in the belief of future progress through self-exploitation. Such incessant attachment to the fantasies of good work is reminiscent of Berlant’s conception of ‘cruel optimism’, which is a ‘relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is . . . impossible, sheer fantasy’ (2011, p. 24). According to Berlant, such damaging objects of desire are maintained because they provide ‘a sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world’ (2011, p. 24). Cruel optimism is thus a double-bind: it is an obstacle to one’s flourishing, while at the same time being an impetus in the building of alternative, meaningful modes of living (Berlant, 2011, p. 1).

While previous scholarship mainly focuses on the critique of the abusive nature of utopian hope, recent studies treat hope as a practice that involves practical experiences of precarious living conditions and affirmative affective engagement with harsh realities (Alacovska et al., 2020). This more personal, quotidian version of hope, or what Bennett (2011) terms ‘little optimism’, provides creative workers with rationales for everyday activities in light of future-oriented ends. For instance, in Hughes’s (2013) investigation of ‘hopeful economies’, it is aesthetic and sensory experiences that maintain Birmingham craft jewellery designers’ commitment to their career. Similarly, Kuehn and Corrigan (2013) argue that voluntary online social production is primarily driven by the pleasures of the productive process, whereas the aim to add value to oneself in a labour market comes secondarily.

Approaching hope as an everyday practice, Alacovska and Gill (2019) point out that most research on creative production focuses exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’. A result of this is that the future-temporality of creative work needs to be reconceptualized when examined in a non-Western context in which precarity is not ‘a state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005) or transient problem but an enduring and prevailing feature of the normal order. Challenging the assumed causal link between creative workers’ future-orientation and their precarity, subjugation and exploitation, Alacovska (2018a, 2019) convincingly demonstrates how hope is directed towards the present to help creative workers cope with the uncertainty of their everyday lives. In contexts where there’s no viable prospect of overcoming precarity, such everyday practice of hope is ‘a mode of work’, ‘a labour practice’ that ‘takes control and creates the chances for achieving the good, against all odds’ (Alacovska et al., 2020).

Drawing on the previous studies, Cook and Cuervo (2019) point out that there are multiple, inherently connected modes of hope, each of which is liable to shift into another. Highlighting the role of agency in the formation and maintenance of hope, they (Cook & Cuervo, 2019) further contend that the notion of ‘political economies of hope’ (Brown, 2005) provides the means to explore how hope is shaped not only by individuals but also by the spaces that those individuals occupy and the institutions within which they live their lives.

Inspired by Cook and Cuervo’s (2019) contextual and dynamic positioning of hope, this article offers a culturally specific account of hope by focusing on a group of migrant workers in China’s post-industrial turn. Defining hope in a broad sense that includes both utopian belief and everyday practice, I investigate how wall painters cope with, get by and navigate conditions in response to economic and social deprivations through the shifting modes of hope. By approaching hope not only as a way of thinking and feeling but also as a practice, this article not only attends to the impact of creative industry discourses on the wall painters, but it also explores these working-class aspirants’ agency within structural constraints.

Dafen as an ethnographic site

This study is based on a longitudinal ethnographic study in Dafen from July 2017 to December 2020. The ethnographic approach facilitates dense exploration of the structural and cultural milieu of the communal context (Hunter, 1995). In my field study, I was trained as an apprentice at a wall studio. The semi-closed space of the wall studio turned out to be an ideal site to conduct onsite and participant observations. I learned the procedures for making copies, observed painters’ interactions with clients and helped with the translation of international orders, which not only facilitated my understanding of business in Dafen, but also helped me to build rapport with my fellow painters. As a researcher and an urban resident, my prolonged and mundane presence as an apprentice helped me to traverse the insider/outsider boundary and reduced the social distance between me and the wall painters. Through daily contact with my painter colleagues, especially my fellow apprentices, I got abundant access to their career-related discussions, which were intricately connected with their hopes. I was also frequently invited to join their lunch and dinner parties, which allowed me to participate in intimate aspects of their daily lives and exposed me to their daily attempts to endure precarity. Furthermore, I shared a room with a fellow apprentice who kindly connected me with other wall painters. As a researcher, my active involvement in this community was regarded by some informants as a source of support from academia and an opportunity to make their voices heard. They invited me to join the wall painters’ WeChat group, where insider stories and discussions circulated. Upon my joining the WeChat group, I sent a message introducing myself and explaining my research purposes and methods, and I was warmly received by this congenial online community. With the consent of the group members, I conducted digital ethnography by looking at their behaviour in a natural and unobtrusive manner. At the request of the group members, all the WeChat identities are anonymized to protect their identities.

I also conducted semi-structured interviews. Some of the informants were recruited through snowball sampling, starting with my painter friends. However, as Dafen’s alleys give off a laid-back vibe, and most wall painters were used to striking up a conversation with passers-by, I felt comfortable approaching some informants during random encounters in alleys. While 14 informants were masters and apprentices who worked collaboratively in three wall studios, others worked individually. All 87 in-depth interviewees granted oral consent; among them, 53 were audio recorded. I took notes during the interviews when interviewees chose not to be audio recorded. I also wrote field notes immediately after each interview and summarized major themes and personal impressions in reflective memos. Transcribed interviews and field notes were loaded into NVivo 12 for coding. Following Layder’s (1998) approach of ‘adaptive coding’, I developed a list of provisional codes based on the related literature (Chan & Pun, 2009; McRobbie, 2016; Wong, 2014) and my field experience in Dafen. I then systematically read the transcripts, assigning these codes to sections of text and generating inductive codes that had emerged from the data. When the initial coding was completed, I went through the codes and the related content to reorganize and reformulate the analysis. In this process, ‘hope’, ‘arts vs commerce’ and ‘migrant experience’ emerged as the three most prominent themes. After deciding to work on ‘hope’ for this article, I reiteratively coded the data with various theoretical conceptualizations of hope in mind. Through this process, the transformation of wall painters’ hope from utopian fantasies for a future of freedom, original work and stability into everyday engagement in playing, creating and waiting becomes salient, which is detailed below.

‘The fun bits are still there’– From ‘a free life’ to playing

Bainianlaojie is an alley located on the eastern side of Dafen. With two canvas shops, a stationery shop, a printing shop and a frame shop, the alley provides painters almost everything they need for their work. Between the stationery shop and a gallery stands a wall studio that covers an area of around 10 square metres. With wooden boards and roller shutters attached to the wall, ceilings and lighting installed overhead and PVC curtains put up at the entrance, this less-than-two-meter-wide, tunnel-like space hosts four masters and their apprentices.

Apprenticeship in Dafen operates on a flexible basis where junior apprentices pay 800–1500 RMB (113.3 – 212.5 USD) per month for the tuition fee, depending on their level of painting skill, and work for free to help masters fill orders without any stipulation on working hours or workload. The cheap tuition, as informants frequently noted, makes the upfront cost in starting their painting career affordable. Besides, the work environment in Dafen is ‘exhilaratingly active and community oriented’ (Wong, 2014, p. 182), with wall painters spontaneously exchanging banter, singing karaoke, playing poker games or even at times holding impromptu concerts. Such a free and dynamic atmosphere, according to many informants, adds to the appeal of wall studios. For instance, the apprentice Juan, a former customer service representative at a factory, recalled her first visit to Dafen, which changed her career trajectory:

It [the trip to Dafen] was eye-opening. You see people . . . basically doing whatever they want. I could totally envision myself working here. I mean, I am a spontaneous person . . . This is the freedom I have been longing for.

Juan was one of the informants who came to Dafen for a ‘free life’. Most of these freedom-seekers were in their 20s or early 30s. All came from small cities or rural areas. Some previously had factory jobs, while others were recent graduates of technical secondary schools or junior colleges. The growth of the new economy has led to a growing young cohort that is motivated to break free of conventional working lives (McRobbie, 2016). As the labour regime in Chinese factories remains largely despotic due to lax labour law enforcement (Siu, 2017), the appeal of creative industries is particularly notable to the new generation of migrant workers who, according to Chan and Pun (2009), exhibit a much stronger desire than their predecessors to separate themselves from bureaucratic control and punitive discipline. With fewer constraints in terms of artistic qualifications, noise control, entrance fees and opening times, wall studios offer these working-class aspirants an alternative lifestyle where they can be free from highly hierarchical work environments and the associated disciplinary measures that characterize factory jobs.

This open work environment provides more than just flexibility. While new painters in Dafen previously had to go door to door, visiting galleries to seek outsourced orders, wall studios provide them the direct contact points to meet streams of traders who comb the village to source paintings. The work opportunities brought about by this flexible work environment, however, at times work against wall painters’ hopes for a ‘free life’. While wall painters are, on the face of it, ‘free’ to decide their working hours, in effect, they do not have much of a choice. While early-stage creative workers in the West usually engage in ‘debt-incurring practice’ that requires them to amass upfront costs and act contrary to their own economic interests (Ross, 2017), fledgling painters in Dafen are faced with nagging daily pressures of economic hardship due to their lack of family, network and financial resources. Having to grasp every order that comes to them, fulfil it with high-quality work and deliver it according to tight schedules in the hope of getting or maintaining a stable client, wall painters often work longer than eight hours a day. Most work through the weekends, and many even stay up until midnight during the busy seasons.

Four months into her apprenticeship, Juan had come to realize that to survive in Dafen, her life was not going to turn out the way she had imagined, which she seemed to have accepted:

I do not have as much free time as I wish, but at least the fun bits are still there, and that makes the work bearable, or even enjoyable. I mean, you do not always get such a ‘reward’ in other jobs.

Juan’s remarks indicated a shift of her attention from freedom from discipline and restriction to everyday pleasure and conviviality. Similar to Juan, many informants regard these spontaneous and boisterous incidents as an indispensable part of their work lives. The fierce competition makes Dafen a ‘self-regulating market’ (von Osten, 2012, p. 86), mobilizing and stimulating the labour subjects who become ‘her/his own capital, being her/his own producer, being her/his own source of revenue’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 232, cited in Lazzarato, 2007). Having to manage themselves as ‘human capital’, wall painters are made into ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 232, cited in Lazzarato, 2007), essentially splitting themselves in two, becoming their ‘own master and slave, a capitalist and a proletarian’ (Lazzarato, 2007, p. 48). This mode of subjectivation functions through governing, controlling, disciplining and regulating one’s self and, at the same time, fashioning, forming and empowering one’s self (Lorey, 2009, p. 193). In this sense, the ‘fun bits’ in the Dafen alleys are not part and parcel of a hedonist culture, but practices of hope that represent informal yet powerful engagements in ‘personal but also social and occupational sociality and solidarity’ (Alacovska, 2018a, p. 52). The random chat by the walls, the guitar concerts in the alley and the poker games on the corner, together with the constant banter in their WeChat group, are ‘relational work’ (Alacovska, 2018b) done to develop collegiality and reciprocity, which is vital for the accomplishment of economic activities in an informal creative industry characterized by insecurity and casualization. Many wall painters reported that these online and offline encounters were the common channels through which they obtained industrial information and at times subcontracted orders from their fellow painters. Moreover, by providing ‘daily comforts’, as many informants put it, these leisure activities became a therapeutic practice that restores a new ‘hopefulness of a rested body and mind’ (Miyazaki, 2015, p. 214). Apart from physical comfort and mental renewal, playing also ‘represent[s] an effort to reclaim control over one’s time and be oneself’ (Pettit, 2019, p. 730), reflecting the classed selves these migrant workers aspire to be. Such a claim for their relative autonomy is crucial for the continuities of their subjectivation, as power is practised only on ‘free subjects’ and only to the extent that they are ‘free’ (Lorey, 2009, p. 194). Turning their utopian mode of hope for a free future into everyday engagement in play, wall painters maintain their economic survival while restoring their bodies and reproducing their selves from their grinding and unrelenting work lives. It is through this paradoxical dialectic of self-subjugation and self-empowerment that the techniques of governing one’s self arises (Lorey, 2009), which leads to the production and endurance of their hopes.

‘I have my own touch’ – From ‘a life of original works’ to creating

There exists a hierarchy within the creative industries that valorizes the artist above the crafts worker (Banks, 2010). In Dafen where original works have been foregrounded as the epitome of the state project ‘From Made in China to Created in China’, the discursive power of authenticity and originality further endorses the superiority of creative labour over other forms of labour (Pang, 2012, p. 66), heightening wall painters’ desire to make original artworks. In my interviews with Dafen wall painters, ‘everyone has an art dream’ was repeated like a mantra. However, their creative endeavours bristle with difficulties.

In the context of Dafen’s bottom-up ‘trivialization’ of intellectual property rights (Pang, 2012), working in spaces where artworks are produced and displayed in public makes painters susceptible to copyright infringement. Apart from wall painters’ semi-open workspaces, short-termism and commercialization also hamper their creative practices. Increasingly abbreviated schedules and rising living costs in Dafen result in speed and efficiency being prioritized over the quality of the work. To cut corners, most copies made in Dafen are first printed onto canvases in high-definition, after which painters apply enough paint to make it appear as if the paintings were completely handmade. The process requires little skill or time, which results in the low price of these products. Original art, on the contrary, demands careful deliberation, concentration and patience, which are unaffordable luxuries for the wall painters in Dafen, where demand for cheap and quickly made products is predominant.

Despite the constraints of time, space and money, there is still room for creativity, at least bits of it, in wall painters’ everyday commissioned work. Wen, a polytechnic graduate in graphic design, came to Dafen to kick-start his artistic career. He started his apprenticeship in figurative painting but later switched to palette knife painting, which made gave him more pleasure:

Figurative paintings require strait-laced work . . . Knife painting is different, it allows some variation and spontaneity. I copy the general outline, but I have my own touch and my own expression, so part of the paintings become my own creation.

Inclined to use brighter colour and rougher strokes, Wen’s work was well received in the market. For one thing, his use of bright colours heightened the joyous atmosphere of his paintings, which is a crucial quality of decorations in Chinese homes. Besides, the thick paint on the canvas accords with Chinese customers’ beliefs about and expectations for oil paintings. Rising in popularity, Wen’s works even replaced their original versions in being displayed on the homepage of an online store.

A few days before 11 November, China’s biggest shopping holiday, the online store invited Wen to shoot a marketing video. Wen agreed and meticulously prepared for the shoot. The final version displayed on the website had been carefully edited – the two-hour painting process was made into a 60-second time-lapse video, displaying close-ups of swiftly moving hands and boldly flying brushes with no faces or backdrops shown on the screen. When the final touches are made to the painting, a photo of the ‘artist’ fades in. It isn’t a photo of Wen but a stranger titled as a professor at an art academy in Beijing. The authorship was simply made up, as I was told by the owner of the website later on:

What customers purchase are not merely paintings, but stories behind the paintings. In their imagination, it should be executed in a private studio and imbued with feelings, thoughts and memories by a cultivated artist, not in a dim Dafen alley by some migrant worker in haste.

The construction of value in artworks today is determined less by the objects themselves than by the performance of certain codes of communication (Helguera, 2012). As ‘the most artful of bodily knowledge’ (Wong, 2014, p. 84), painting is privileged as a particularly expressive skill tied to the unique individual who wields it. Consistently represented as labourers of reproduction, Dafen’s painters are not seen as artists engaged in the production of original works. Unlike products for which the site of production will elevate the sense of authenticity associated with them, in the case of Dafen paintings, the more the origins of the paintings are blurred, the higher the price these paintings seem to fetch (Wong, 2014, p. 207). The irony of presenting Wen’s paintings as handmade ‘true art’ by replacing him in the commercial with a fictional artist speaks to the poignant fact that wall painters, placed at the bottom of the professional hierarchy, are faced with a bleak future in their search for artistic identities. Disappointed not to see himself in the video clip, Wen was able to salvage this experience later on:

This is how it works in Dafen. One will eventually get used to it. I do not care whether I am identified by my name or not, as long as I am doing what I like and my works are recognized by the consumer.

Similar to Wen, many wall painters get used to labouring anonymously without expectation of attaching their names to their work. Focusing on the pleasure of self-expression and the validation that can come from the consumer, their creative attempts have led to commercial success in some cases. For instance, Geng, a lover of traditional Chinese paintings, often did work that depicted landscapes by combining the techniques of Chinese ink painting and Western oil painting. Consistent with the rising normcore trend in home decor in the domestic market, his minimalist-style paintings became popular. With a large number of orders on hand, Geng was able to recruit apprentices and subcontract work to others. Geng called his paintings that disclaimed tradition ‘creation’ (chuangzuo), and carefully distinguished them from ‘original paintings’:

Making originals requires methodical, careful and slow work, I simply do not have the time for that. But I am creating, in my own way, and I am happy about what I am doing right now. Art critics may regard it as rubbish, but people like what I have made and they are willing to pay for my work, and that is good enough for me.

While creative workers from the middle- or upper-middle-class intelligentsia commonly harbour grandiose fantasies of a golden future (Menger, 1999), the informants in Dafen reportedly come to the realization early on that for them such hope is almost destined to fail. Working in the trade painting industry without access to institutional apparatuses like curatorial, collector or museum support, evidence abounds of the slim chances of them attaching their names to their work, not to mention being famous or gaining institutional recognition. As Lee (2019) points out, precarization is a process of becoming excluded from the labour market to various degrees, including being denied the recognition of one’s labour. Such effacement of wall painters’ identities in their work thwarts their longing for the rewards of ‘making originals’. Compensating for this uncertainty or rather unlikelihood of artistic recognition, wall painters turn their mode of hope from the future-oriented longing for making originals into everyday creative practices in the present. Focusing both on the pleasure of self-expression and the validation of the consumer, wall painters not only survive economic precarity by catering to market tastes but also claim relative autonomy by adding their own touch. Through ‘the dialectic of self-subjugation and self-empowerment’ (Lorey, 2009), wall painters maintain a hopeful attachment to their daily work by creating.

‘It just takes patience for the right timing’ – From ‘a life of stability’ to waiting

Born in a village in Fujian Province, Huang had worked as a factory worker before he came to Dafen 15 years ago. Having witnessed the closures of factories, he felt fortunate to have landed in his job as a painter:

Painting is a promising job. It is part of the cultural industries that the government is promoting. And as you get better [at painting], you get more orders. In the long run, it is a stable job with growth potential.

Given the precarious nature of their work lives, it came as a surprise that many informants, like Huang, regarded painting as a means to achieve a stable life. Most of these informants had previously been engaged in factory jobs or small entrepreneurship activities, and they frequently described their former occupations as having been stressful, insecure and hopeless. The general anxiety associated with hazy career prospects is related to China’s ‘new normal’ characterized by economic slowdown and an employment crunch (Lindtner, 2017). Once providing a rising living standard for migrant workers, factory jobs in China have been on a steady decline since the global financial crisis in 2008 (Lee, 2019). Compared to increasingly unstable and devalued factory jobs, working in Dafen, which intersects with both flexible craft specialization and the creative industry, has become a ‘safer choice’ for some migrant workers. For one thing, aligning themselves with a craft identity allows wall painters to cater to the rising consumer demand for handmade crafts; for another, working in an officially recognized model site of the creative industry, many wall painters, as was shown in the previous section, have come to perceive and represent their work as creative, which helps them gain a sense of security and pride. While elite cultural producers from the Global North are predominantly understood as passionate and aspirational entrepreneurial subjects actively pursuing precarious lives (Alacovska & Gill, 2019), life at the other end of the spectrum in creative industries can be, as is demonstrated in Huang’s remarks above, a careful choice made after weighing potential losses and gains. In China, where socio-economic upheavals have already made precarity a widespread condition, engaging in an industry as valorized as that of the creative industry can seem to migrant workers to be one of the very few paths available to a secure future.

This vision is, however, too optimistic as the precarity that the wall painters face is not only financial but also spatial. In Shenzhen, mainland China’s most expensive housing market, the hukou is especially coveted because it provides access to public rental houses. Consequently, migrant workers who are without a hukou often resort to renting ‘illegal’ areas to cut the cost of the production and distribution of their goods, which in Dafen’s case turns out to be the gallery walls. In Dafen’s transformation into a global art centre, art museums, galleries and high-end hotels are planned to be built, whereas wall studios, characterized by their substandard facilities, informal business and insanitary amenities, have been constantly at risk of being demolished. While a few attempted demolitions were abandoned due to wall painters’ vehement opposition, the final blow eventually came in March 2019. Shortly after an accidental fire at a wall studio, the local government announced a hard-line crackdown on ‘illegal structures’ in Dafen, which triggered a heated discussion in the wall painters’ WeChat group. Wall painters came up with plans to stop the crackdown by seeking media support and negotiating with the government. As their attempts failed, disappointment pervaded among the wall painters. ‘We should not give up’, one urged. ‘I will go on a hunger strike tomorrow to get the leader to talk to me, and you are welcome to join me!’ In the Chinese context, where tight control and extensive surveillance have made collective action almost impossible (King et al., 2017), this attempt to initiate progressive social action was quickly brought to a stop. After that message had been posted, the group became quiet until someone finally broke the silence: ‘Thank you for your perseverance. We’ll find a way out, and it is not worth sacrificing your health.’ Many seconded this message, trying to appease the angry painter. The group discussion fizzled out a few days later. One of the wall painters remarked in an almost nonchalant manner: ‘If there is nothing we can do, we just need to move on. Luckily, we still have some clients; that is what we need to hold on to at this moment.’ Having barely encountered any resistance, the demolition of the Dafen wall studios was completed within three months.

Shortly after losing their workspaces, some wall painters moved on to other jobs or places, while others stayed in Dafen by moving into indoor galleries. The move into an indoor gallery required those who stayed behind to work even harder to pay the expensive rent, which led them to fondly recall the ‘good old days’ in their wall studios. ‘There may be another Dafen (with wall studios) in the near future, you never know’, they said. As Miyazaki (2004, p. 128) notes, hope is the only method for recapturing hope. The longing to resume their lost lives is an effort to revive the possibilities of a future of freedom, original work and stability, even though these possibilities were only previously lived in their imaginations. It is with this double movement of both the future and past temporal ecstasies that the present of the act is constituted (Zigon, 2009, p. 267). Shifting their hopes from a utopian projection of a stable future into the everyday practice of waiting, wall painters carry on their lives in the midst of embittered quotidian realities. For some, it could be a passive waiting with ‘resigned hope’ (Crapanzano, 2003, p. 27) that depends on chance and fate for its fulfilment. But that isn’t always the case. Showing necessary discretion in a restrictive political context, waiting, with ‘a constant monitoring of the likelihood that the events one is waiting for will occur’ (Brun, 2015, p. 23), can be ‘strategic rather than passive’ (Lombard, 2013, p. 817). Huang, the aforementioned veteran in Dafen, is a case in point. After losing his wall studio to the demolition, he moved back to his hometown but remained in touch with Dafen galleries for subcontracted orders. Having gone through the trials and tribulations of Dafen’s trade painting business, he was confident about the return of Dafen wall studios:

We will be back. The local government at times gets tough, but they will loosen up the policies when there is a turn in the tide. That is how it works in Dafen. It just takes patience for the right timing.

Huang’s observation was astute. Dictated by the imperative of the party state to ‘deal with changes and challenges in the course of comprehensive transformation’ (Schoon & Altrock, 2014, p. 215), China’s regulatory practices in urban spaces are inconsistent and contingent, fluctuating between soft and hard approaches. Such ambivalence created a small window of opportunity for wall painters after the COVID-19 lockdown. As soon as the local government vowed to support the once tightly controlled micro-economy in a bid to tackle the rising unemployment, Huang got in touch with his contacts in Dafen. With their help, he found a semi-open stair entrance of a building available for rent with a permit gained through government connivance during the post-pandemic economic recovery. Having lived in his hometown where the living expenses were much cheaper than those of Dafen for one year, Huang managed to come up with the high down payment necessary for the rental. Huang’s retreat to his hometown is not merely ‘a timepass’ devoid of agency but ‘an active, conscious, materialized practice’ (Alacovska et al., 2020) of hope to forge new political strategies. By actively developing alliances and solutions in advance, such waiting, in the right conditions, as is shown in Huang’s case, can lead to readiness when opportunities come along. Huang is not the only one that managed to return to a semi-open studio in Dafen. During my last visit to Dafen in December 2020, at least five similar studios had been set up and more were said to be on the way.

Conclusion

Through the lens of the wall painters, this article contributes insights from the Global South to mainstream studies of work in creative industries. Giving birth to ‘a fairy tale version of art, free market and Chinese globalization’ (Wong, 2014), the dynamic imaginary of Dafen wall studios appealed to migrants who found factory jobs limiting and tedious. While voluntarily opting for precarious employment conditions out of passion has become a status marker of the middle class in the West (McRobbie, 2016), migrant workers in Dafen chose to become wall painters in the hope of achieving a life of freedom, original work and stability in a volatile labour market. Such choice, for them, represents a new promise of upward mobility and social esteem at a time of labour market restructuring. Their very attempt to break the class divisions that structure access to occupations and commerce exhibits the ideological effects of creative industry discourses on the working-class in China’s creative turn. Moreover, the appeal of the wall studios did not vanish even after their sudden demolition, which reflects the plight of migrant workers during China’s industrial upgrading when uncertainties are prevalent and opportunities are stratified.

This article has further developed an approach to creative labour precarity from an intersectional perspective. Holding the promise of flexibility, newness and communal living, life in Dafen nevertheless is characterized by multifaceted precarity due to migrant workers’ informal employment, unrecognized labour, unauthorized citizenship and liminal workspaces. The multiple forms of precarity intersect and coalesce, reinforcing the conditions that threaten wall painters’ careers. To construct modest and bearable work lives, wall painters engage in three practices of hope: playing, creating and waiting. It is through these therapeutic, empowering and tactical practices that they cope with what is beyond their control, with a belief in the possibility of a minimum sense of agency.

This article has also further contributed to the political economy of hope by delineating the changing contours of hope in the vicissitudes of Dafen wall studios. As Hage (2003, p. 12) points out, society not only distributes hope unequally, it also distributes different kinds of hope. The findings presented in this article further indicate that the unequal and differentiated distribution of hope is intricately related to the uneven distribution of precarity. While ‘precarity spares no one’ (Ettlinger, 2007, p. 322) in the global trend of neoliberal capitalism, this, as Lorey (2009) argues, in no way implies equality in precarity. On the contrary, different social groups are exposed to different levels and forms of precarity in geographically, politically and economically diverse contexts (Paret & Gleeson, 2016). Different from creative workers from the privileged classes whose precarity represents a transient problem in their path to fame (Friedman et al., 2017), wall painters’ prolonged and multifaceted experiences of insecurity, exclusion and oppression preclude a confident disposition in the face of the future, resulting in the shift of wall painters’ hopes from a utopian to an everyday mode. Such reorientation of knowledge includes a temporal reorientation (Miyazaki, 2004, p. 5): as I was repeatedly told by my informants, they were ‘trying to live in the moment’. The shift of wall painters’ attention from the future to the present is a result of the ‘enforced presentism’ of economic precarity, which turns hoping into ‘a structuring mechanism of an immediate liveable present’ (Alacovska, 2019, p. 1126). The desire to sustain their career made wall painters ‘downloaded to the individual and offloaded to the science of calculation and market economics’ (Appadurai, 2014, p. 68). Engaging in the urgent struggle for economic survival, wall painters endure their lives through the everyday practices of hope, leaving other forms of precarity unaddressed, and a future of freedom, original work and stability further away from realization.