The Miner

鑛客 | 第一屆礦山藝術季

The inaugural Mine Arts Festival in 2020 was held in Jinguashi’s Qitang Old Street. After five months of curation, selection, participation, and creation, six works were chosen. ProtoPlain’s The Miner was born out of everyday village life, the nostalgia of a mountain town’s past, and the surrounding natural landscape.
An abandoned hydraulic structure, overgrown with grasses and blooming wildflowers, mirrors the silvergrass swaying across the slopes—its dampness recalling the lingering songs once carried through the mine shafts.
Through the gathering of residents and the pauses of visitors, fragments of flavor and memory drift in the air, drawing neighbors closer, offering a taste of the town’s quietude, and reviving a gilded chapter once sealed away.
Beside Qitang Old Street, in a house quietly reclaimed by greenery, mirrored steel poles stand as sentinels. They chime softly with wind and rain, scattering halos of mist and refracted light in irregular patterns—an echo of the fragmented memories embedded in the tunnels. The unchanging rhythm of fog, rain, and silvergrass has sung for a century the ballads of the mining years. Visitors to Guashan are invited to linger, to listen, to wait for the mist and the rain—to sit, share a drink with the mountain town, and uncover its stories in person.