Yang Shaobin (杨少斌), born to a coalmining family in Hebei Province, has put together an exhibition of oil paintings and installations that, according to the catalogue, “dialectically thinks about the linkages between Chinese history, culture and social development.” Nick Young looks at these and other pictures, wondering what “dialectically” might mean nowadays.

Fifty years ago farmland on the northeastern outskirts of Beijing was broken to make way for a military-industrial factory complex. Built with East German aid and in Bahaus style, the factories were, for their time, state-of-the-socialist-art. They turned out electronic components for military and civilian applications and employed some of the best-paid proletarians in China.

By the mid 1990s state owned enterprise reform had left most of the Dashanzi (大山子) factory units lying empty and encircled by a booming central business district. Artists began to move in, setting up studios and galleries in workshops that were cheap to rent and, thanks to the German architects, relatively well-lit. Over the last five years the area has evolved rapidly from bohemian to boutique. Rents shot up as cafes, clothes and furniture stores, bookshops, bars and clubs crowded in. They were followed by consulting and communications companies keen to show their connection to a profoundly changed China.

It is uncertain how long Beijing’s authorities will tolerate this organic and piecemeal development of what is now prime real estate. Squeezed between a bulging capital and its airport, the land is vulnerable both to hungry property developers and to city planners driven by visions of Olympian grandeur. But, for the time being, Dashanzi is providing space not just for the self-consciously avant garde and for playful, Maoist chic—both tendencies abounding in the now-trendy district—but also for thoughtful work examining ordinary lives.

Such was Yang Shaobin’s “800 Metres Under” exhibition, which showed in the Long March Space in October. The exhibition is centred on a coalmine in Tangshan, Hebei, that itself encapsulates recent Chinese history: opened in the 19th century; passed to British control as part of the indemnity for the Boxer Rebellion; occupied by Japan; taken back by the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party); liberated by Communism; and now on the way to commercialisation.

At bottom: coal

Few activities in China are more fundamental than coalmining—both to the country’s fast-forward growth and to the “challenges” inherent in that growth. Coal produces around three quarters of China’s total energy. Given massive reserves and few economically viable alternatives, it will continue to do so for a good while yet. But the energy comes at high environmental cost (China is poised to become the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases), and the human cost of production is also at high. According to official figures, 5,938 coalminers died in a total of 3,306 Chinese mine accidents last year.

Yet despite its socio-economic and ecological importance, few activities are more hidden from public view than mining. This lends significance to the very act of inviting us underground.

Yang’s large canvasses, however, are by no means polemical. They simply show us the faces and figures of miners at work, in the bathhouse, on the way home. Often the men are grinning self consciously, as if aware of being caught in a camera lens (as indeed they probably were during Yang’s visits to the mine). In several of the paintings, individual miners or groups are superimposed, larger than life, on the cluttered and messy above-ground landscape—dilapidated, orange-brick courtyards surrounded by piles of litter and spoil, with a few sticks of trees growing out of oil-spattered mud. These are dismal enough places, but they are portrayed here matter-of-factly rather than angrily.

Visitors to the exhibition also enter a (convincing) replica of a miner’s one-room home—a floor of ground coal and half the space occupied by a brick kang. Leading from the room is a replica tunnel where visitors stand by bogies filled with coal and watch a short film that makes a descent through a working mine, the soundtrack entirely composed of the noise of mine machinery.

The catalogue treats us to a few examples of how Maoist art depicted miners: a burly delegate marches confidently to the podium in a political meeting; a beaming woman miner dons her helmet and prepares to leave her neat little home, while her chirpy daughter looks on joyfully; a group of men engage in heroic struggle at the coal face. Everyone represents big ideas in a way that irremediably erodes their humanity.

Yang’s miners, by contrast, seem to stand for nothing but themselves: ordinary people, leading tough, ordinary lives in a very grubby environment, but lives that have small comforts as well as privations. The pictures invite us to look at them as people not as types.

Nevertheless, these pictures also frequently recall other mining communities worldwide. Most striking is a group on one of the cut-and-paste landscapes, in which two men are supporting an injured colleague. It is a universal image that could just as easily have come from South Wales, New South Wales or Pennsylvania.

“Farmer! Farmer!”

The Long March Space is part of a broader Long March “Project” that, since 2002, has staged numerous exhibitions, events, “walking displays” and investigations at points along the original route of Mao’s 6,000 kilometre trek. One of the early protagonists, Qin Ga (琴嘎), recorded the project’s progress in a map tattooed across his back. More recent events have included the collection of paper cuttings from 15,000 individuals in Yanchuan (延川) County, Yan’an, where the March ended. These, like several other Project collections, have since been shown overseas, global interest in China being sufficient to prise open doors of international festivals and exhibitions.

Whether as Project or Space, Long March is not unique among the Dashanzi galleries in exploring contemporary social themes. For example, a second Dashanzi International Art Festival, held earlier this year, featured several poignant exhibitions on the theme of urban destruction and reconstruction.

Meanwhile, an exhibition of images from rural areas, “Farmer! Farmer!” (农民农民), now on show at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, draws together the work of dozens of “reform and opening” period artists and seems to indicate that social awareness is becoming de rigeur in the mainstream.

In a written introduction, Museum Director, Fan Di An (范 ? 安), refers to the Communist Party’s “proposal to construct a socialist new countryside” and says that this calls for “literary and artistic works about the countryside . . . with more sincere, more culture-oriented and . . . richer artistic expression.” That can be read as a message that art should be deployed for political purposes; or, at the same time, as a serious invitation to more “sincere” opening of the eyes.

Although worked in a variety of media, portraiture is the dominant theme: looking closely at people, sometimes individually, and including migrants, not just traditional farmers, in the gaze. There is relatively little interest in the political economy of agriculture, or in folkloric themes; but there are several striking studies of manual labour, and all of these focus on the individual effort of lifting this sack or crate, not on the broader, productive purpose. But on the whole it is the effort to capture faces that stands out, and the great majority of the more recent works seems honest and compassionate with the artist looking hard at the subjects.

A more sophisticated critic could doubtless de-construct many of the images to show us the epistemological lenses through which the artists are looking. For these are not farmers’ paintings, they are the viewpoint of an artistic elite. Nevertheless, that elite is certainly not giving us crude depictions of noble savages, or honest sons of toil, or the suffering masses. There is something more personal at work here, and it has resulted in some paintings that are beautiful and emotive without being sentimental, It may not be such a bad thing if caring becomes politically correct; leastwise, there could be worse signs of the times.

Women! Women!

It doesn’t take a sophisticated critic to point out that Farmer! Farmer! is an overwhelmingly male vision, given that only five out of the 63 featured artists are women.

This helps explains the decision of Li Wenzi (李文子), two years ago, to open the private “3/4 Gallery,” as a platform for women artists, a few blocks outside the Dashanzi district. The name, she confirms, is an allusion to Mao’s famous declaration that women hold up half the sky, politely suggesting that was an understatement.

As little as five years ago in China, fine art shelves of bookstores had a high proportion of books on erotic art, and there is still a thriving genre of painters knocking off come-hither pictures of (often ethnic minority) women. And the country is of course now deluged with representations of women in that most powerful medium, advertising.

By no means all of artists featured in 3/4's exhibitions set out to challenge these representations, or indeed necessarily to represent women at all—this seems more a platform for artists who are women than for women artists whose subject is women.
But some of the artists are indeed exploring what means to be a woman and, given the male dominance of the mainstream, 3/4 is an importance space for this exploration to take place.

Keen to advance the cause of gender awareness, the United Nations in Beijing decided to celebrate UN day in October with a “public exhibition” of selected works by women, in collaboration with 3/4, in the UN building. It is a curious notion that this could count as “public,” when visitors have to negotiate security guards at the gate and be admitted only with the consent of a staff member. Moreover, the works chosen were among the most graceful and decorative—landscapes in ink, cats, Yi women in a rather idealised style—of a kind that might uncontroversially adorn a diplomatic building. Unfortunately the advocacy message here could easily be taken as “women paint prettily.” That, one would think, is not quite the point.