Travel Report: Dafen Art Museum – Shenzhen, China.

February 2018. Perched to the side of Dafen Oil Painting Village, the super modern Dafen Art Museum in Shenzhen is well worth an hour of your time. Housed in a striking building on a large open square, the museum showcases original contemporary paintings from local artists.

Chinese canal life sculpture.

As with the adjacent Oil Painting Village, there’s no entry fee for this art museum. You can just stroll in and investigate at your leisure. Here at the main entrance there’s a giant sculpture depicting traditional Chinese canal life from the city of Suzhou and Tongli Water Town. 

Dafen Art Museum, Shenzhen.

Dafen Art Museum.

The museum is a huge, air-conditioned space. There’s not much of a security presence and you can take as many photos as you want. The whole museum takes a stripped back approach, with barely any info to accompany the paintings. With each piece, you simply get the name of the painter and the year it was created.

One of the museum’s wonderful paintings.

Dafen Art Museum hosts an annual Oil Painting Fair every October. There are special exhibitions and a huge live auction that fetched over 700 million RMB in 2017 ($1.1000000). I couldn’t help but wonder how much this fantastic painting, almost photographic in its clarity, would cost to take home.

A purr-fect painting.

The art museum is well worth a stop after you’ve finished exploring Dafen Oil Painting Village. It opens daily (except Mondays) from 10:00-17:00. There is very little English language literature on the museum online. Nevertheless, I did manage to find this article about the building and its design.

For more on my adventures in the city, check out more of travel reports on Shenzhen.

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