Hi, we are artist and country agnostic now. We have artists from China, but also India and the rest of the world and have been ramping up USA artist signups recently. Of available artists (whether on our platform or elsewhere) Chinese ones are still the largest group of any country.

We display the country location of every artist profile on our site and heavily try to promote our US base.

The text on the website is misleadingly suggestive that all artists are in USA.

That's a special section featuring and highlighting USA artists, as you can order direct from artists on our site so you can pick and choose them. If you clicked through and selected them you would in fact be ordering from USA artists. It can be misleading if all you do is scan the home page, but we did not design it to be a bait-and-switch.

If you actually go through the purchase funnel it also gets re-iterated (you are prompted to choose where you want your artists from).

I can concur with OP, I'm certain instapainting had Chinese artists at some point of time. Maybe they found the higher costs of native artists to offset shipping costs from China and changed their model.

Yes there is a big blog about how they set it up with an artist city in China https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to...

Absolutely. I remember going down this internet rabbit hole one day a few years ago. I remember feeling like it helped me better understand just how many people there are in China that a single city/area could be known for putting out artwork that we see in our chain retailers here in the USA.

https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to...