X-Blind Spot, Yang Shaobin Exhibition - socio critical paintings, videos and sculptures.

Since 2004, Yang Shaobin and the Long March team have been on the road, working deep in the coalmining communities of rural China. This exhibition ‘X-Blind Spot’ is the final showcase of this four year, two-stage collaboration following ‘800 Meters Under’ which was presented at Long March Space in September 2006.

Photos of medical bottles filled with lung fluid, taken from the coal miners.

For ‘X – Blind Spot’ the team traveled to Chang Zhi, Shuo Zhou and Da Tong in Shanxi Province, extending further to Hebei, Northeastern China and the plains of Mongolia. This collaborative project not only presents the high-tech, super-scale environment of open-pit mines, but also the small, home owned operations, provocatively illustrating a particular kind of social geography and urbanization, from micro to macro levels of official and private engagement. Yang Shaobin’s involvement with these human geographies, and his witnessing of the lived consequence of China’s industrial legacy and its corresponding economies, powerfully comes to the fore in these resulting works.

Whereas ‘800 Meters Under’ took darkness as its frame, exploring the physicality of being underground, ‘X-Blind Spot’ manipulates light and shadow, a visualization of ideas of positive and negative, white in black, black in white. The ‘X’ in the title of this exhibition refers to the process of x-ray. ‘X’ expresses a caution, a marked site. At the same time, ‘Blind Spot’ is a warning, a questioning, an investigation, and a testimony. This term also refers to the large-scale mining equipment used in these geographical areas called ‘KOMATSU 170’, at either end of the machine, there is a blind spot – 50 meters in diameter at the front, and 60 meters in diameter at the back. Within the boundaries of this ‘blind spot’ is plausible potential ruin.

Such intertextuality has been constructed between project and artist; artist and work; work and reality – these relationships revised, subverted, twisted in a powerful form of self-reflection. In ‘X – Blind Spot’, these interchangeable concepts are mediated through depicting peripheral action – the medical units, the rescue teams, the camera crew, the chronically ill and their specimen jars. The present and absent qualities of Yang Shaobin’s artistic x-ray expose his own development of light, these works acting as personal filter, offering perhaps another kind of visual ‘blind spot’.

Exhibition dates: September 4 --- October 18, 2008?
Curator: Lu Jie, Project Manager: Xiao Xiong