Zhao Liang: Black Face, White Face

22 Feb – 6 Apr, 2013 Press Release

Pékin Fine Arts is pleased to present “Zhao Liang: Black Face, White Face”, a new video installation exhibited for the first time, made during Zhao Liang’s current project “Dust” a documentary film about miners in China’s far North East.

Artist Statement

“Juxtaposing the “White Face” of the limestone miners and the “Black Face” of the coal miners, I try to create a sense of psychological connection between these itinerant labourers despite their differing backgrounds and home village origins. Regardless of where they come from, they now inhabit the same space of hard labour and poor working conditions, susceptible to chronic work related disease, long periods of separation from families, and mounting debts from low wages.

According to Marx’s , under capitalism labor is ‘variable capital’ whose surplus value can be increased by long hours at low wages, revealing the basic building blocks of Marx’s theories of the development of capitalism and capitalist production relations.
In the face of these principles acted out in the mining communities of Inner Mongolia, I want to find an inner balance or equal exchange of values that brings disparate people, including miners, bosses, and indigenous people, together.