China's van Goghs tells the stories of peasant turned painters who are carving out different paths for themselves after years of hand copying Western masterpieces, which are sold to high street retailers around the world. While van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime, these production line painters have sold van Goghs in the thousands. But van Gogh represents more than just the livelihoods of these painter workers; his art, life and legend motivates them to fulfill their own dreams. Their journey is emblematic of of China’s Dream for the 21st Century: to go from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’.

Yu Haibo is a filmmaker and photograph artist and curator. He’s the Director of Shenzhen Professional Photographers Association and the Chief Photo Editor of Shenzhen Economic Daily. His most prominent photo story China Dafen Oil Painting Village won the 49th World Press Photography Contest 2006, and was collected by San Francisco Modern Art Museum, V&A Museum, London, etc. Yu is the pioneer in surrealism photography in China for his work “on the other riverside of the illusion chain” which won the top prize at the 15th National Photography Exhibition in 1988. Since 1989, he has been working on documentary photography.

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker, scholar, and film curator. Yu received PhD in Film from the University of Westminster, and MPhil in Sociology from Cambridge University. She publishes on Chinese documentary, first person documentary, amateur cinema and cinematic memory on Studies in Documentary Film, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, etc. She is the co-editor of China's iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21 Century (Bloomsbury, 2014). Her film works include Photographing Shenzhen (2007), Memory of Home (2009), and the feature length documentary film China’s van Goghs (2016).

kikiyu19@gmail.com