Jinguashi's First Mine Art Season Lights Up the Cultural Vein of the Mines
This autumn, Jinguashi is full of art! The first "Mine Art Season" runs from October 29 to November 30, rekindling the memories of Jinguashi's mining community. Participating artists say, "The human life, architecture and history that Jinguashi itself has left behind are themselves a gold-bearing vein."
Huang Ding-yao, who took on the curatorial work for the first Mine Art Season, comes from Tugou in Tainan. With more than ten years of accumulated experience in rural community building, he once curated the "Rural Art Museum" and founded the "Elegant Farmer Art Factory." In the mining community of the Northeast Coast he saw a unique charm of local culture and life, which drew him all the way from the vast Chianan Plain to the Jinguashi mines of the Northeast Coast.
The old mines in the eyes of the artists are full of memories of daily life, brimming with emotion everywhere
The first Mine Art Season held an open call for submissions. Of the 43 entries, the jury selected 6, using the area around Qitang Old Street in Jinguashi as the creative base, including the hospital ruins, air-raid shelters, streams and old-street life.
Among these 6 selected works, Lin Chen-hsun summons the collective memory of Jinguashi's people by recreating the ruins of the miners' hospital, while Wang Kuo-jen disturbs the spatial language of the mines through vivid colors. Tseng Hsi-kai offers a profound metaphor: "The human life, architecture and history that Jinguashi itself has left behind are themselves a gold-bearing vein." Through their own sensitivity and imagination, the creators mine the cultural life of the mining community as their subject matter.
Chupu Architects, meanwhile, used an abandoned water-management space, where abundant moisture nurtures moss plants, to construct through a balanced distribution of greenery and metal a unique atmosphere for the mining community's abandoned spaces.
Artist Huang Chung-chen, for his part, highlights the contrast with past life experiences. Taking the long winter rains as his theme, he notes that Jinguashi residents in summer coated their rooftop felt roofing with asphalt; this scene of labor on every household's rooftop was almost like a religious ritual. The artist turned this life memory into the work "Lift Open / Behind / Gold and Dark," connecting residents' shared life experience and likening it to the darkness beneath the glory of the gold mines after it faded.
Huang Ding-yao believes, "For those who will continue to live in Jinguashi in the future, what is needed is a support system." All that is needed is for the outside world to give encouragement and recognition; Jinguashi's own local character and the rich value of its cultural memories naturally provide the energy for creation, and can even become a basis for creating together with residents.
From the Chianan Plain to the Northeast Coast: how can the Tugou experience be applied to a mining community?
In 2002, the New Taipei City Government began redeveloping the abandoned mine site of the Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation and planning the Gold Museum Park. In 2004, the Gold Museum opened, turning a new page in the cultural revival of Jinguashi's mining community. It was not until this year that the first Mine Art Season was launched.
"It would not be an exaggeration to say there are dozens, even hundreds, of local art festivals across Taiwan, China." Huang Ding-yao reflects that when art festivals are reduced to driving tourist crowds, or used directly to revitalize remote areas, these goals actually overlook one thing: an "art festival" must first make local people "feel it."
Huang Ding-yao quotes the Japanese curator of the "Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale," Fram Kitagawa: "The original purpose of an art festival is to make residents smile again." To emphasize community participation and the public character of creating local charm through artists' interventions, he persuaded the public sector to transform the curatorial content into a creative plan with greater significance for community participation.
He defined a set of subtitles for the first Mine Art Season: "An art carnival where the mountains invite everyone to take part." He explains that curation is only an interface; through artists' creative actions, visitors and local residents are guided into dialogue, so that residents can believe in the uniqueness of their hometown and rediscover pride and hope. Only such "shared intent" can open up new opportunities.
The pride and loss in the hearts of Jinguashi residents
"We in Jinguashi are not the same as Jiufen. Jiufen was the Yan family's private enterprise (Taiyang Company); those panning for gold just had to come to an agreement with the Yan family. Jinguashi was public: during the Japanese era it was the Taiwan Mining Corporation, and after the Nationalist government came to Taiwan it set up the Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation. Coming here to mine meant working for a boss, so the makeup of the two places is completely different."
With the introduction of A-Xi, a Jinguashi local-history enthusiast, the difference between Jinguashi and Jiufen immediately becomes clear. "The gold prospectors of Jiufen had personalities closer to gamblers: bold, daring to take a risk. But the miners of Jinguashi were mostly on the conservative, dutiful side."
In 1971, Jiufen's gold mines were exhausted, and Taiyang Mining ended gold mining in Jiufen. What had once been a flourishing place hailed as "Little Shanghai" was left with only the sorrow of empty buildings. In the same period, Jinguashi's Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation tried to shift to copper smelting and processing, but ended up suffering heavy losses and closed the Jinguashi mine in 1987. A prosperous mountain town of more than five thousand people lost its population almost overnight, leaving less than one tenth.
Later, Jiufen became an overnight sensation thanks to Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1989 film "A City of Sadness" and became a flagship tourist attraction on the Northeast Coast. Nearby Jinguashi, also a mining community, was used as a filming location for the 1992 film "Hill of No Return," but 30 years on, Jinguashi still retains the solitude of a mining community.
Watching Jiufen flourish again, the people of Jinguashi inevitably compare their own situation with it. Whether for better or worse, although the tourist crowds brought business opportunities to Jiufen, they left Jinguashi with the cultural memories of the mines and a lonely historical atmosphere.
Starting from this, Huang Ding-yao believes, "Jinguashi's unique historical background and environmental conditions make it very suitable for art festival curation. But what it needs is time; someone must be willing to wait, to spend several years walking a different path."
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