Everyday creativity in wall studios under China’s creative-city turn: migrant painters in Dafen, Shenzhen

Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in Dafen, Shenzhen, and an analysis of policy and media discourses, this article examines how working-class migrant painters sustain everyday creativity within the creative policy gap of China’s creative-city turn. Dafen’s transformation from a replica-painting village into an ‘original’ art district has elevated institutionally recognized artistic production while marginalizing the copy-based cultural labour that historically sustained the cluster. Focusing on wall studios, temporary, public-facing workspaces attached to building façades, the article brings the notion of creativity dispositif into dialogue with everyday urbanism to analyse how creative-city governance is lived and negotiated in situated urban spaces. It shows how wall painters recombine marginal alleys, digital channels and neighbourhood networks into workable infrastructures for cultural labour; recalibrate work-life rhythms through pauses, nocturnal hours and cycles of return to make precarious self-employment more liveable; and preserve modest expressive openings through situated reworkings of images, skills and display spaces. The article conceptualizes these practices as infrastructural, temporal and expressive creativity. It argues that everyday creativity is neither a romantic alternative to creative-city governance nor a simple effect of policy co-optation, but a situated and ambivalent practice through which marginal cultural workers inhabit uneven regimes of recognition, visibility and value.