Painter Yang Shaobin, the 'Chinese Francis Bacon', has returned to the coal mining communities of his childhood to record the truth, he tells Fintan O'Toole in Beijing
In a corner of a wide factory floor in eastern Beijing, there is a small wooden house with one door and one window. The kitchen has three pairs of grimy boots against one wall but two sweet umbrellas, pink and green, against the other. In the bedroom there's a poster of happy, well-fed kids on the wall above a plastic mattress that has pictures of teacups and flowers printed on it. A miner's helmet and a filthy coat are thrown on the bed. There's a TV in the corner, but the sounds that come from it are the clink and shuffle of lifts and trolleys. Running from the kitchen through the bedroom and down a long black corridor is a thick slagheap of finely ground coal, its black sheen absorbing the light from the electric bulbs. It twists through what should be the fourth wall of the bedroom but is in fact the entrance to a long, narrow shaft. A line of coal trucks runs along the dark corridor towards a video screen that plays a short, looped film of the inside of a coal mine, lit by the eerie, claustrophobic glimmer of head-lamps.
The recreated house and mineshaft are the centrepiece of a large-scale exhibition of oil paintings of miners and their communities by one of China's most significant contemporary artists, Yang Shaobin.
The show, at the Long March Space, has an appropriate setting. The gallery is one of a cluster in the same street, Jiuxianqiao Lu, in buildings that used to make up one of China's biggest factories for electrical components.
The place was a classic locus of China's industrial revolution, and a job there was regarded as a guarantee of security for life. But it became a victim of China's economic reform and went bankrupt. Its empty shell has the haunting quality of a broken dream and it is an apt setting for Yang's exploration of another ghost of the old communist idealism. The miners in his paintings were once heroes of socialist labour. Now they are just obscure men and women who do a dirty, dangerous job.
With his beautifully tie-dyed black-and-white shirt, elegantly foreshortened black linen trousers, shaved head and designer glasses, Yang Shaobin looks the epitome of the super-cool, ultra-cosmopolitan contemporary artist. And, in a way, he is. At 43, he has an international reputation, and his work sells to American and European galleries. In the early 1990s, he lived with the other avant-garde stars, Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, in a commune near the Old Summer Palace. He was selected for the 1999 Venice Biennale and his violent images of people inflicting and suffering pain earned him the convenient tag of "the Chinese Francis Bacon". His mining paintings (exhibited under the collective title, 800 Metres) will tour galleries in England and Germany next year. He seems light years away from the grimy, almost hellish, world of his pictures. But he isn't.
Yang Shaobin is a miner's son, born in 1963 in the Kailuan coalfield near the city of Tangshan, on the coast west of Beijing. The area is the cradle of China's industrial revolution and Kailuan was the country's first modern coal mine. If Yang's images are starkly reminiscent of England's mining communities before Margaret Thatcher killed them off, the resemblance is not accidental: Kailuan was seized by Britain in 1901 and the mines were developed as if they were in Derbyshire or south Wales. A massive, though unsuccessful, strike in the coalfield in 1922 copper-fastened the image of the Kailuan miners as bastions of the Chinese proletariat.
When Yang Shaobin was growing up, this imagery was deeply ingrained in his daily life, almost as pervasive as the coal dust that hung in the air and worked its way into every cranny of the community. Every mine had its own team of worker-artists who produced sunny socialist realist paintings and drawings of bright-eyed, cheerful miners in spick-and-span overalls almost as pristine as the gleaming white teeth revealed by their obligatory smiles.
"They were not realistic depictions of actual life," Yang remembers, "but works of propaganda. Everyone was very clean. There was no dust on their boots and even the towels were white. It was fake realism."
But it was through these collective art groups that Yang Shaobin first came into contact with art. Though he worked initially as a policeman in Kailuan, the relative freedom of the reform era allowed him to develop a career as one of the young painters who began to put China back into the international art world.
Like many of his fellow-artists of the time, Yang reacted against the old collectivist orthodoxies of heroic realism by stressing individual suffering and individual expression. He travelled a long distance from Kailuan's close-knit community and pseudo-realistic imagery.
AND THEN, EVENTUALLY, he went back. As part of the Long March Project, an ambitious long-term endeavour by a group of Chinese and international artists to explore the legacy and reality of 20th-century Chinese history, he returned to Kailuan in 2004 and 2005, and began to document its daily life.
"Initially the idea was historical and archival, collecting actual objects and documents for a historical exhibition," he says. "But for me it was too personal for it to remain on that level. I went back because my parents are still there, to visit them. At some stage I would have dealt with all of these experiences and memories in my work, but the Long March Project provided a perfect context.
"It was almost a little bit of fate. It struck me that going down into the mine is also a Long March and that this was also a way of connecting my own memories with Chinese history. So sometimes I was working off private memory and sometimes off a collective memory. Those private memories were fading, which meant I had enough distance to see it all afresh. But also, I was returning through those memories to the era of the Cultural Revolution."
On a practical level, Yang's personal contacts in the area proved crucial, because it is almost impossible for outsiders to gain access to the mines.
"To go in, you need to know these people," he says. "Otherwise you've no chance, especially with the private mines, which are very, very restrictive."
The restrictions are deliberate - China's coal mines, with their abysmal safety record, are perhaps the site of the greatest conflict between the historical imagery of a proletarian paradise and the reality of an exploitative industry where ordinary lives are of no account.
As part of the project, Yang Shaobin had his own back tattooed with a map of China highlighting the sites of recent coal mining accidents. The country's coal mines have the worst safety record in the world. Last year, 3,341 accidents killed 5,986 people. The record so far this year, after a public outcry over a few especially gruesome incidents, is only slightly better, with 2,900 deaths in the first eight months.
The deaths are accidental only in the most immediate sense. Most of them arise from neglect and corruption. The small private collieries that proliferated after the economic reforms of the 1980s are supposed to be tightly regulated by local officials. But many of the officials are corrupt: in Shaanxi province alone this year, seven chiefs of mine safety bureaux have been convicted of taking large bribes from mine-owners.
Many more officials are active investors in private mines, giving them a direct interest in covering up exploitative and dangerous conditions. Last week, the vice-minister of supervision, Chen Changzhi, told a press conference that 5,357 officials, either in government or in state-owned enterprises, have investments in coal mines totalling 755 million yuan (€75.5 million). In Yang Shaobin's native Tangshan area, an investigation into an accident that killed more than 100 miners last December has uncovered the fact that Li Guojun, vice-director of the local bureau of public security, had invested 500,000 yuan (€50,000) in the colliery and was doing very nicely out of his dividends.
Though Yang's paintings are not intended as a direct social commentary, they do strongly reflect this reality and its psychological consequences. What he found when he went back to his childhood home was that conditions in the coalfield were in some respects much worse than they had been when he was young.
"When I was a kid, during the Cultural Revolution period, everyone in the mines felt equal and there was no elite," he says. "However hard things were, people felt they belonged to a collective effort. But going back after the period of reform, it's clear that things have deteriorated a lot. There's been almost a breaking apart of that collective spirit."
He is neither nostalgic for the past, nor attempting to create a cynical or satirical reflection on the old heroic imagery. He is even wary of his own feeling that things are worse than they used to be.
"Part of it is just the distancing effect of remembering your childhood, which always seems better than it was," he says. "But I wanted to show things as I found them, and I found them to be bad. There's a deterioration psychologically and spiritually, a hopelessness, a feeling that there's no way out. These people used to be promoted in the propaganda as heroes to be emulated. Now outsiders seldom go there and the miners seldom come out. There's a sense of isolation and neglect that's made worse by the lingering memory of the previous image."
At first glance, this hopelessness seems to be contradicted by the white teeth that shine out from the smiling faces of many of the miners in Yang's paintings, seemingly echoing the cheery expressions in the old propaganda pictures. But the smiles are perhaps the most subtly effective part of the work, becoming, in the context, much sadder and crueller than broken bodies might be. "The paintings show people for whom life and death are very closely linked," he says. "When they take off their shoes and put on their boots at ground level, they don't know if they will come up alive again. That knowledge makes you a little numb, and numbness looks a bit like happiness. The smile is covering up the loss, the hardship, the anxiety. In this world, it's only when you've developed a very hard inner self that you can smile."
YANG DENIES HAVING a political agenda in all of this and doubts that art has much effect on reality. "Art can't change life, it's about the expression of life," he says. "It's not able to change history, just to change art history."
But in China at least, art history is history too. The images of heroic working people expressed a hope that was mistaken for reality and then reality was forcefully altered to make it fit the images. Much of what makes Yang Shaobin's paintings of miners so powerful is that they are at once a dismantling of official socialist realist images and a return to their stated intent. He is doing, after all, what artists under Mao were supposed to do: showing the lives of ordinary working people and exploring a collective consciousness. That makes it all the more disturbing that what he finds is so harsh and cruel.
The possibility of conducting a dialogue with the immediate past in this way is part, he says, of what makes China, for all its restrictions, such an interesting place to be an artist.
"China can't really compete with the West in terms of technical resources and the art market," he says. "But in terms of how reality is being played out, the West can't compete with China. We're going from a very systematic society to a very chaotic one, and that's a rich field for artists. So western artists are mostly concerned with the problems of reproduction. We're mostly concerned with the problems of reality."