These are the quick & dirty travel notes from our second ThingsCon trip to Shenzhen, China. Read all posts from this series here (tag: ViewSourceII), or all blog posts relating to Shenzhen here (tag: Shenzhen). The latter one includes last fall’s trip to Shenzhen as well.
Software eats the world. Nowhere is this move obvious, more graspable than at the Huaqiang markets: You can still feel how diverse a line-up of devices has once existed here. These days, smartphone (and accessories) have taken over huge parts of what was once almost certainly a hugely more diverse market.
That said, there’s a lot of smartphone accessories. And drones. So. Many. Drones.
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A guy walks by, whispering in the conspiratorial tone of drug dealers, “iPhone 7?” He won’t be the only one today.
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It’s Sunday, 11am. The market is open. It’s quiet, not much going on. But the main floors are open.
Usually the CPARK showroom is a showroom for high-end industrial design of sorts.
Drones, drones, drones!
Beautiful boards
In there’s mayhem of a different sort. An educational DIY robot event is ongoing, and dozens of kids are squeaking with joy as they build and race their robots.
Robo race
A cute little DIY paper robot
On a shelf, a little expo piece has scribbled on it the words “bricks’R’knowledge”.
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A salad place called Sexy Salad. A huge wall print sport the tagline “Sexy Life / Salad On”.
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The metro is super easy to navigate, and luckily for me plenty of signage is available in English. That said, without being able to pay via phone, you need to stand in line at ticket machines for a long time, with more or less exact change. A single ride in the city runs around 3-7 Yuan (roughly 40-80 Eurocents).
Temporary Shenzhen HQ: Huaqiang Bei
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More Mobikes.
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Quick refreshment to go. €0.40.
Half a year past its Best Before date. But what’s half a year among friends?
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Visited Dafen village. In the 1990 it started out as an artist enclave or urban village that produced lots of replica paintings (Wikipedia). (Note: Many of these paintings presumably long have entered the public domain.)
Dafen is in fact situated in between huge residential high rises, see the pic from the metro station:
This is the view from Dafen metro. The village is a village only in name. In fact, I believe Urban Village is an administrative term in Shenzhen.
Everything in this little urban village revolves around art. Most of it is the making and selling of paintings. But you can also get art supplies. Or frames. So many frames.
Art supplies for sale in Dafen
Frameshop in Dafen Village
Dafen Art Museum
It’s a little hard to tell if this is still the main thing and which role local artists produce in their own right. It’s especially hard since the (supposedly pretty good) Dafen Art Museum seemed to be under renovation, and only one floor was open—and the exhibition there focused on local art students’ rendering of everyday objects:
Note the little info plaques next to the images? They include QR codes so you can follow the artists!
I enjoyed it a great deal, and frankly would’ve bought and hung quite a few of them, but this being the museum they weren’t for sale.
Walking through the village, you can see plenty of artists painting pictures. Right there, out on the street. It’s pretty cool to watch.
Here, some folks are examining a freshly painted canvas
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By dinner time, the gang was all here:
The gang’s all here!
