Ondrej Brody and Kristofer Paetau: Painting China Now

For the exhibition, the artists use comic books language to design the exhibition panels, which depict the saga of the show’s own creation. On top of the panels will be placed some oil on canvas paintings, produced in Chinese painting studios, portraying practices of torture that take place in that country.

Since 2007, duo Brody & Paetau has been producing paintings by using so called “painting factories” in China: commercial studios that paint hyper-realist works by demand. Before coming to São Paulo, “Painting China Now” has been seen in Belgium (2007), Netherlands (2008), Poland (2010), and the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (2013). It’s the first production of the “Made in China” series, in which artists outsource their paintings to those studios, where, many times, labor conditions are precarious.

Thus, Brody & Paetau raise awareness about the outsourcing/offshoring phenomenon. Testing the limits of that strategy, they explore its critical potential. At the same time that they utilize specific technical abilities of the Chinese painters, showing that pretty much any artist can work with assistants, the duo ironically mimic the production process of many famous contemporary artists that employs dozens of assistances to supply works to a marked avid of art.