I met many coal miners. The young ones made a particularly strong impression on me with their strength, the way the sun still shone in their eyes. The young man in this picture caught my attention. He is tall and has a muscular build. His even, white teeth and the fearlessness in his eyes resembled that of a strong animal. The coal dust on his skin, though temporary, defines his social status and the bleakness of his future, drawing for him boundaries and limitations. After he’d washed, with his bushy head of hair and pale skin, he was like a man from another world. He’s around thirty years old; he can still aff ord to have hopes and wishes in life. I was curious about whether this monotonous, dark life underground can contain him. I didn’t tell the coal miners what I was doing. I was after naturalness, the rawness of these workers’ vulnerability. Humanity outside the coal mines after a hard day of work was basic and simple. All they craved was a glass of water to warm their stomachs and a cigarette to warm their minds. I managed with my camera to catch the workers unawares, but it was hard not to draw suspicion. But after a while they accepted me as part of the setting and were surprised, to say the least, when they saw photos of the finished paintings.

Conditions in the mines are poor. Safety is a very real issue, but even after coming out of the mines at the end of a twelve-hour shift, they often have to walk for miles to the mine head. They are used to extreme conditions and often find themselves drenched in muck and sweat by the time they get to rest. I wanted to portray the vividness of their exhaustion, which influenced my decisions on colour and light. I think I’ve been most influenced by Soviet painters whose subject was also the working class. The vacant look in these miners’ eyes conveys an emptiness inside them. They lead a hard life and find pleasure in the simplest things, like smoking a cigarette. These are real people, not heroes, their woes summarised in the lines and sweat on their faces. The middle-aged man in this painting most likely started working in the mines as a teenager. After decades of hard work in a job with a very high death rate, he still sees no end to this tough life. Th e nature of coal mining is that it is largely hereditary – a son follows his father down the mine – making it almost impossible for them to break out of their predetermined hardship.

Smoking, a small pleasure for many of us, is one of the biggest pleasures and pastimes for a coal miner. It is something they can only do outside the mine. I got to know many of them reasonably well and learned from them the rules and all sorts of things one needed to know about surviving in the mines. The care and detail I put into my paintings stems, I think, from a genuine concern for their health and working conditions. In most of my paintings, the miners have a cigarette. It’s not a health issue they particularly worry about; there are plenty of other things that will shorten their lifespan. Apart from fatal accidents – gas and dust explosions, cave-ins, mine shaft floods – the coal dust gathers in their lungs and causes serious respiratory problems. The safety masks are fascinating; different posts in the mine require different types of masks. It has got so I can tell where a man works just by the mask around his neck. This particular miner, looking pensively into the distance – what’s he looking at, you wonder – is someone I remember well from my visits to the mines over the years. One time he wasn’t there and I got worried. He had been in an accident. I knew better than to ask about it.

It is very upsetting to see an old miner at work. It is simply wrong when an old miner can’t retire and enjoy life because he has no other option but to work to survive. I believe it’s my duty to use my paintbrush to report the misery and pain of these workers and allow the world to know their plight. Miners have sometimes asked me to go to the authorities in Beijing and tell them how their salaries have been unreasonably cut, about how often they get injured and get no help or compensation from their employer, about how dangerous their working conditions are no matter how many times they complain, about how they have to stay underground with only the food or drink they bring themselves each day. I cannot promise them anything, but I promise to myself that I will try to tell their stories in my paintings. The sadness conveyed in the eyes of the elderly miner in this portrait is a mixture of despair and vacancy. Having spent his whole life underground doing heavy manual labour, he has never known the world outside of his work. He has had to work hard day in day out, summer and winter alike, all his life.

These miners are squinting from the sun, just lying on the ground in a relaxed manner. They all have a cigarette in hand and are telling each other a joke or two. I’m interested in how ordinary people live, and like to portray figures with unbreakable spirits, with the strength to deal with life. And life for them is not all about hard work and misery. I particularly liked joking with this group, sometimes telling them I was from Beijing, sometimes that I was from Dongbei. Within this group, they come from different parts of China. I wonder how they coped with the weather and working conditions in Inner Mongolia and Ningxia. A group portrait like this normally takes four-to-six weeks to complete as there are so many details to pay attention to, and the way they interact with each other requires a higher level of craft. A head-and-shoulder portrait takes a comparatively shorter time – around a week to ten days of full-time work. I suppose you’d call me prolific; I never seem to run out of topics to paint about.