Subscribe
E-Paper
 |
| 'Hwangji 330" (1981) by Hwang Jai-hyoung / Courtesy of MMCA |
Artist Hwang Jai-hyoung, who immersed himself into the hard lives of miners, presents works spanning four decades at MMCA
By Park Han-sol
Hwang Jai-hyoung's "Hwangji 330" is the artist's tribute to a miner whose life was cut short in a tragic mining accident in the 1980s.
In Hwang's painting, the dead man's uniform is wrinkled and torn. The ID card clipped on the pocket of the worn-out jacket gives little information about its owner, as his face remains blurry and is faded to reflect that much time has passed since the photo was taken. The white underwear shirt inside the uniform has holes here and there with loose threads and a neck label about to fall off. The intense portrait provokes the viewers to imagine various aspects about the miner.
Given his tattered work clothes, one may speculate that he was a frugal and hard-working man ― a responsible breadwinner who risked his life to go deep into the earth to feed his children and send them to school. Perhaps his hard work is part of a long gone past, and he's now enjoying the sunset of his life with several playful grandchildren.
All of a sudden, the happily-ever-after tale crashes into the cold reality with shocking revelations about its owner. The miner, the late Kim Bong-chun, was the victim of a mine explosion in Hwangji-dong, Gangwon Province in 1980.
 |
| Miner-painter Hwang Jai-hyoung / Courtesy of MMCA |
"I was troubled as I felt I might use the life of the miner as a simple subject of my artwork. It felt like I was a mere bystander or a con man. That's why I decided to head to the coalfield," the 69-year-old painter said.
He settled in Gangwon Province in the autumn of 1982 to lead the life of a coal miner.
His four decades of work as a painter-cum-miner is on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA) under the title "Hwang Jai-hyoung: Restoration of Human Dignity." The exhibition explores Hwang's art world portraying the rise and fall of Korea's coal mining industry and the sacrifices made behind Korea's economic miracle during the 1970s and 1980s.
Hwang worked in the mines of Taebaek, Samcheok and Jeongseon, while at the same time producing works that captured the lives underground realistically ― the blood, sweat and tears of workers that have been forgotten in Korea's rapid economic growth.
"An Industrial Worker" (1982) is a portrait of a laborer whose face has been purposefully erased. In the 1950s and 60s, the government gave miners a rather heroic-sounding title ― "industry warriors." It encouraged students at vocational high schools to pursue careers with slogans such as, "We are leaders of the modernization of the motherland." But in reality, coal mining's life-threatening risks were downplayed, while the workers were treated as expendable sources of labor.
 |
| Hwang's "Lunch" (1985) / Courtesy of MMCA |
Another of Hwang's works "Lunch" (1985) depicts a lunchtime scene in a dark mine shaft shrouded with airborne coal dust. The miners, sitting in groups and picking out coal powder from their rice, light up colleagues' lunch boxes with their headlamps, turning a tool for digging into an instrument that visualizes the human connection that lasts even deep under the earth's surface.
The painter's life as a miner, however, had to come to an abrupt end in 1985. For three years in an environment where wearing glasses is naturally forbidden, he worked wearing contact lenses. Constant exposure to coal dust gradually worsened his eyes' condition nearly to the point of a complete loss of vision. It was time to give up.
The time when Hwang left the mine coincided with the Korean government's initiative to encourage the use of clean energy ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics and its subsequent implementation of the Coal Industry Rationalization Policy the next year. As the demand for briquettes dropped, mines were closed one after another, leaving workers unemployed. The eastern city of Taebaek, once home to the nation's largest coalfields, had lost its luster.
Against such a backdrop, Hwang expanded his artistic scope of reality from portraits of workers to the mountainous landscape of Gangwon Province that housed the declining coal mining villages. Despite the shift in his subject from miners to the landscape, the artist claimed the two topics have consistency as mountains reflect human lives.
Witnessing the rise and fall of the coal mining industry, the artist incorporated elements of mines such as soil and coal as materials into some of his works as ingredients. His "Sunset at Tancheon," originally drawn in 1990, depicts the golden sunlight reflecting over Tancheon stream in Sabuk, dirtied with coal powder and filth. It isn't a scene of typical beauty but rather, an ugly revelation of the truth ― traces of life left behind as a result of the aggressive, material-driven growth of Korean society.
From the 2010s, Hwang began to look beyond Gangwon Province, reinterpreting the lives of the coal mining town of the 1980s and bringing them forth to the present day as a universal story. The miners and surrounding landscapes in his oil paintings reappeared on the canvas, this time with human hair as its new material.
"When you drop a wig in the bathtub or on the bed, it looks like an actual person is lying there. The hair represents a person's being," the artist said. "It's like a film or a tape on which life is recorded. It's an entity with its own life force."
 |
| Hwang's "Exposed Face" (2017) / Courtesy of MMCA |
Hair outlasts the human body even after death. By using endless strands of hair he gathered at barbershops to re-draw his 2002 portrait of the miner in "Exposed Face" (2017), he reminds the audience that the lives of the marginalized population are not issues limited to the 1980s but continue as today's story. The face of the miner, who was sacrificed under the social system, becomes a proxy for today's alienated class.
"The dead end of the mine is where humans despair. It exists not only in Taebaek but also in Seoul," Hwang stated.
Through his work, the artist sends a message of comfort and consolation to the marginalized, something he deems especially necessary in this day and age, where the prospect of disaster looms in the materialistic society.
The artist described the exhibition's title "Restoration of Human Dignity" as "indicating the true subversion of social values, where the haves learn from the have-nots. It's a true relationship of symbiosis."
The exhibition will run until Aug. 22.
