X-Blind Spot No.1 2008

Yang Shaobin finds rich narratives in the everyday lives of rural and industrial workers in China. Using a realist style, Yang’s paintings and sculptures reference the idealised depictions of rural labour created for and during the Cultural Revolution, but provide a somewhat darker vision, exploring the contemporary realities and dangers faced by individuals in China’s huge labour force. These two paintings are part of the X-blind spot project Yang developed in collaboration with Beijing-based contemporary art group the Long March Project; they explore the peripheral effects of coalmining, depicting lungs riddled with coal dust. Kept in jars as specimens, the lungs offer evidence of the chronic, and deadly, respiratory ailments coalminers suffer. Although vast in scale, X-blind spot rejects the heroic vision of socialist labour, confronting instead the public invisibility of contemporary workers’ lives, pointing to the ‘blind spot’.