Carving Plight of Coal Miners, He Churns China

[Saul Thomas <stthomas@uchicago.edu>]

(Go to http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/world/asia/14zhang.html to see 
artist's work.)

NY Times, July 14, 2007
The Saturday Profile
Carving Plight of Coal Miners, He Churns China
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

BEIJING

IT is not easy to forget an encounter with Zhang Jianhua’s sculptures of 
Chinese coal miners; that is, if one is lucky enough to see them.

Many of the life-size works depict miners sitting on the ground in their 
black rubber boots wearing looks of sheer fatigue. Some stare blankly 
into the distance or prop up their heads with both hands, their faces 
fixed in nameless agony.

Yet, easily overlooked at first are the most haunting sculptures of all. 
At the edge of the out-of-the-way Beijing lot in a new art zone that is 
frequented by foreigners — but few Chinese — lie six figures shrouded in 
green blankets. Silently, they symbolize the mostly anonymous victims of 
China’s rolling mineworker catastrophe.

Although Mr. Zhang, 35, has an impeccable background as a student of the 
Central Academy of Fine Arts and has received critical praise for years, 
no Chinese museum or established gallery has been willing to display his 
coal miner work in its entirety, as he insists that they must. When an 
exhibit was organized in April at 798 Art Space, one of Beijing’s 
premier forums for contemporary artists, censors demanded that he leave 
the six dead workers out of the show.

Officially, 4,794 coal miners died in work-related accidents in China 
last year — more than 13 every day, on average, though many believe that 
the official figures understate the real toll. But Mr. Zhang’s temerity 
in representing the victims has won his work what might be called a soft 
ban.

“Each year, countless coal accidents take place,” he said. “The media 
puts the death toll at six to seven thousand, but I know the numbers 
don’t stop there. There are between 20 and 30 thousand deaths a year, 
but those who die at many illegal mines are not counted, and these 
deaths are not allowed to be reported.”

These days, a great deal of contemporary Chinese art veers into 
abstraction, or clever visual punning, often riffing on the country’s 
revolutionary past or on the new prosperity that many have found. But 
Mr. Zhang’s route to prominence has been more old-fashioned. He embraces 
realism, and uses it in a time-honored tradition as a prod to the social 
conscience of a society that he finds lacking in that department.

The artist’s first taste of successful shock realism came with another 
series of sculptures four years ago in which he depicted the lives of 
peasants from his native Henan Province. The 12 figures in that series 
included an elderly woman sitting alone, threadbare migrant workers and 
rural schoolteachers.

The work drew critical praise when it was introduced at a gallery in 
Beijing. But when the show began touring other venues in the capital 
later that year, displayed on the grounds of two middle-class housing 
developments and at China Agricultural University, it drew strong 
protests, with residents and students attacking it as vulgar, striking 
the artist and knocking over some of the figures. The university 
exhibition had to be canceled after only two hours. “These were 
beggars,” said one commentator in a school newspaper. “It’s sick.” 
Another complained, “Rural areas have progress, too. Why not show that?”

Mr. Zhang’s answer is that China these days is consumed with what he 
calls a “bubble reality.” Euphemism and sentimentality have deep roots 
in Chinese art, but on top of this has come a kind of idealizing 
self-censorship reinforced by the state propaganda system and further 
fueled by years of strong growth.

IN China today, news reports are full of problems being solved. The 
radio airwaves are full of odes to perfect love, and art galleries are 
full of pretty pictures. “Very few works speak to social problems,” Mr. 
Zhang said. “Chinese contemporary art doesn’t make people understand. It 
has lost its function and its very important social, avant-garde and 
revolutionary features.

“Today’s artists now create neither pain nor itch, and they don’t remain 
in people’s memories. Many of them are scared.”

Mr. Zhang’s choice of topics is not the only thing that sets him apart 
from many of his contemporaries. He said that to prepare for his miner 
series, he made numerous trips to the coal country in Shanxi and Henan 
Provinces, living with miners for weeks at a time, soaking up their 
hard-knocks culture while simultaneously observing the lives of the 
illegal mine owners, with their flashy, sudden wealth.

The artist grew particularly animated as he described the scenes of 
lavish weddings organized for the daughters of coal mine owners in 
Datong, one of China’s most famous mining towns, of motorcades of 
stretch Cadillacs and Hummers and Mercedeses, festively honking their 
horns. “This is the kind of ostentation they want,” he said. “Yet 
underneath the wheels are piles of white bones and pools of fresh blood.”

ALTHOUGH he is a habitué of the capital, in many ways, Mr. Zhang’s 
reporting on coal miners was a return to his roots. He was born in a 
small village in Henan Province to simple parents. His father was an 
agricultural extension worker and his mother a farmer. As a boy he cut 
hay to supplement the family income, and ran away to Beijing after high 
school to escape his parents’ pressures on him to conform.

Mr. Zhang’s pursuit of art grew out of praise from a boyhood teacher for 
his calligraphy. He took a variety of small jobs, paying his way through 
art school, and eventually his parents came to understand that his 
developing love of painting was a way to assure his future.

An early source of rebelliousness was set off by resentment of his 
village’s domineering chief, who he said constantly bullied the weak and 
forced people to flatter him. “I’ve been very sensitive since 
childhood,” he said. “I don’t know why, but because of my sensitivity, I 
did things that other people ignored.”

For his next project, clearly another effort at unveiling a ubiquitous 
but officially invisible social problem, Mr. Zhang said he planned to 
portray the country’s large number of prostitutes. “Not the prostitutes 
of the rich, but the ordinary, working-class prostitutes, who live in 
very difficult conditions.”

Was there pleasure in such provocation? “I am not just trying to 
criticize my country for the sake of it,” Mr. Zhang said. “I want my 
country to be better. I want it to be more democratic. I want it to have 
even better development.”