Yang Shaobin is a senior Chinese painter whose practice since the late 1980s reflects the social realities affecting China today. A leading representative of the cynical realist movement, his early gestural depictions of distressed figures have often been considered subversive, and his interest in individual experience is continued in the recent body of work ‘X-Blind Spot’ exhibited in ‘The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6).

Yang Shaobin was born in Tangshan in Hebei Province, an area renowned in China for its coal mining industry, and an important source of China’s robust mineral economy. In 2004, he began a field-based collaboration with the Long March Project (which started with 800 Metres Under 2006 and culminated in the series ‘X-Blind Spot’ 2008) that is an unflinching visual exploration of the parallel economic and social realities in China’s state-run and privately owned collieries. The second phase of the project, ‘X-Blind Spot’ focused on the open-pit coal mines in the northern provinces including Shanxi, Hebei and Inner Mongolia, which Yang and his team visited from 2007–08, drawing attention to the miners and the working conditions, as well as the social effects related to coal production in China, and a perceived ‘thirst for economic power and stature in the region’.(1) In a world of increasingly limited natural resources, ‘X-Blind Spot’ is a microcosm of the spiraling impact of accelerated industrial productivity and the mining of minerals, especially coal, which generates most of China’s electricity today.

In August 2007, Yang Shaobin and the Long March curators visited the Qinhuangdao Beidaihe Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis Treatment and Recovery Centre at the Fushun open-pit coal mine in Hebei province. The centre was established for the preventative treatment of miners who suffer from pneumoconiosis or ‘black lung’ disease caused by inhaling coal dust and working in the mine.(2) The devastating effects of chronic respiratory ailments are rendered in the two large paintings, X-Blind Spot No.1 and X-Blind Spot No.4, recently acquired for the collection. Drawn from photographs taken during Yang’s visit to the medical ward, these monumental paintings portray the damaged lungs of miners, each sealed in a specimen container. They appear at first as solid abstract forms static against a luminous, aquatic-hued palette. Each resembles lumps of coal. On closer inspection of the painted surface, the meticulous detail of Yang’s brush-work reveals perforations in the lung tissue that evoke a ravaged terrain; the turbid landscape of an open-pit mine perhaps. The scale of the canvasses dwarfs the viewer while magnifying the indelible mark of industry on the body. These are poignant images of the dead that reveal, as Yang notes, ‘the visible risk of labour’ and are a spare and vivid tribute to the teams of workers who once breathed energy into a mineral dependent economy.(3) While compelling in their commentary on the rhetoric of progress as well as China’s industrial legacy, these works also express the exceptional descriptive accuracy of a master painter.

Mellissa Kavenagh, Artlines 2-2010, pp.36–37.

Endnotes

1 Yang Shaobin artist talk, APT6, Brisbane, 6 December 2009.

2 Approximately 440 000 people in China suffer from pneumoconiosis. There is an estimated 600 000 undiagnosed cases of which 46 per cent are miners. See Lu Jie (ed.), Yang Shaobin: X-Blind Spot, Charta, Milan, Italy, 2009. p.116. For more information see: Mark Tran, ‘China mine rescue a “miracle”’, Guardian Weekly, 9 April 2010, p.10, and Sharon Lafraniere, ‘Graft in China covers up toll of coal miners’, New York Times, 11 April 2009.

3 See Yang Shaobin. ‘On site excerpts from Yang Shaobin’s notebook’ in Lu Jie. (ed.), Yang Shaobin: X-Blind Spot, Charta, Milan, Italy, 2009, p.112.