"After "Building Souls" became popular, Huang Jianyi learned the news that his father fell ill at the construction site.
Text / Ba Jiuling (WeChat public account: Wu Xiaobo channel)
In June 2024, Huang Jianyi returned to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts to see the graduation exhibition.
Two years ago, at the same Guangmei graduation exhibition, Huang Jianyi became famous. His graduation work was dubbed "hardcore completion" by the media and spread throughout the network. The work is called "Building the Soul", which is a sculpture of the image of a construction worker welded with 1,400 catties of steel and iron. Huang Jianyi's father is a construction worker.
"Chikutama"
Source: Courtesy of the interviewee
CCTV and other media came to the door one after another, and during that time, Huang Jianyi's WeChat friend application did not stop, and the remarks were usually "I am a ...... of so-and-so media", and I wanted to make an appointment with him for an interview. The minibus asked him if he remembered how many media interviews he had received. He said he hadn't counted, it was too much. "Every day is one interview after another, receiving waves of people."
This kind of life lasted for more than half a year, the heat subsided, and in 2023, there will be a few people sporadically about interviews. And this year, we are the first.
A young man after the fire
Before and after the meeting, Huang Jianyi always expressed an emotion to the minibus: worried that we would be disappointed. What are you disappointed about? "I'm afraid that you have come all the way here, but what you see is an ordinary ordinary person."
Putting aside the experience of becoming popular, Huang Jianyi said that he was an ordinary person, born in an ordinary worker family, and lived an ordinary life. After the halo faded, he, like most young people, had to "crawl and roll" in society.
Huang Jianyi
Source: Photographed by minibus
In Huang Jianyi's view, two years after graduation, he had a very failed life - at least after having the highlights of the People's Daily and CCTV reports, he did not accept the good opportunities that followed. For example, make your own self-media account, be an Internet celebrity, and enjoy a wave of traffic dividends; For example, following the advice of my brothers and friends, I created the second work after "Building the Soul" while it was hot, and became a well-known artist; Another example is to accept the invitation of Li Zexiang, the "godfather of DJI", to work under him.
Two years after graduation, Huang Jianyi traveled to four cities, from Guangzhou to Jiangmen, from Jiangmen to Shenzhen, and finally from Shenzhen to Zhongshan.
The place where he met Huang Jianyi was the entrance of his company's factory - a company in Zhongshan that made amusement machinery, and he made appearance designs for machinery. This job did not bring him much sense of achievement, because the core work of the equipment is engineering design, and the appearance is only a "shell" for the equipment, which belongs to the edge work.
"But at least you can make money first." Huang Jianyi said it very realistically. "One more thing, I really haven't figured it out yet, what exactly do I want? What kind of road to take? ”
When he was working in Jiangmen, Huang Jianyi was young and vigorous, but he ran into a wall because he directly questioned the opinions of the leaders. In the end, he chose to leave Jiangmen. For personal reasons, he came to Zhongshan from Shenzhen.
In his current work, Huang Jianyi chooses to put away the edges and corners and try to be silent - he will implement the leader's requirements quietly and try not to express his opinions; People who "follow the crowd" in the company do not conflict with others, and strive to be "mediocre". Huang Jianyi said that he is now an ordinary office worker, working from 9 to 5 every day. Colleagues in the office, no one knew about his past - except for a senior brother from the same school.
He defined working in the company as "a kind of cultivation", cultivating temperament and human sophistication, and taking the initiative to polish the "thorns" on his body. And this kind of cultivation is obviously exposed when Huang Jianyi points to a work in this year's graduation exhibition. He said: "This is not good", it seems that he thinks it is too decisive, and then adds, "It's not that the work is not good......", he wants to make up for it, but in the end he doesn't know how to say it better. In the end, I had to give up.
At the fork in the road between dreams and life
In addition to watching the graduation exhibition, Huang Jianyi also took the minibus to his past sculpture classroom. The classrooms are like construction sites, with mud, axes, dead branches, and bulldozers. Huang Jianyi stood in the doorway, pointing to a place in the left corner of the classroom, where he created "Building the Soul".
Sculpture classroom
Source: Photographed by minibus
The creative process is hard. For six months, in addition to eating and sleeping, Huang Jianyi spent almost all of his time on his works. From creativity, ideation, modeling, material preparation, welding and a series of other tasks, he is responsible for a series of work.
The main body of "Building the Soul" is molded with steel bars, which are discarded and not used in the construction site, and the rust is mottled. It was not easy to collect 1,400 catties of steel bars, at first he looked for them at the scrap yards around Guangmei, and then expanded to the university town, Panyu District, and then to the periphery.
The steel bars bought back were uneven and of different shapes, which did not meet Huang Jianyi's modeling expectations. He bought a cutting machine for another 1,500 and cut them one by one and adjusted them one by one. Mr. Huang said the cutter was the most expensive item in his graduation project.
Huang Jianyi raised his hands and made a weld shape. "For almost three months, I didn't stop for a moment, and my arm was sore." He also gestured with his hand to his arm, during which there were many more scratches. Thankfully, nothing was a big problem. "Because it's really very careful."
Huang Jianyi, who is welding "Building Souls".
Source: Courtesy of the interviewee
And this kind of work, for construction workers like Huang Jianyi's father, has been a daily routine for decades. In the creation description of "Building the Soul", Huang Jianyi wrote: "We are accustomed to looking up at the starry sky, but ignoring the silent land under our feet; We celebrate the beauty of architecture, but we forget the hardships of its builders. I want to pay tribute to my father and all the builders in the language of architecture. ”
Mr. Huang said that because of his parents, he was extremely familiar with construction workers. When he was in college, when he met a worker who was smoking and resting on the side of the road, Huang Jianyi would take the initiative to talk to him and chat about family life, which made him better understand his parents' lives. After the chat, he would always call his parents.
After "Building the Soul", Huang Jianyi almost never touched sculpture creation again. In the sculpture classroom, seeing Huang Jianyi touching the sculptures one by one, the minibus asked him, "Do you want to pick up a carving knife again after graduation?" ”
Huang Jianyi returned to the sculpture classroom
Source: Photographed by minibus
He smiled, his head hesitantly bobbing from side to side slightly, and did not speak. The friend next to him patted him on the shoulder and said, "If he really wanted to touch it, he wouldn't wait until now." ”
But as he crouched down and stared in silence at a sculpture, the minibus recalled a phrase he had said many times: "I want to be an artist too, but at least live first." ”
When the artist and the worker's family, two seemingly naturally contradictory elements, are intertwined, there is always a tendency for some sharp voices to emerge. In past media reports, some people blamed Huang Jianyi for the cost of his graduation project, and his father had to work long hours on the construction site. Huang Jianyi said that his graduation project should be the least spent among the graduates, about seven or eight thousand yuan, and these expenses are earned by himself.
Soon after entering college, Huang Jianyi began to make money for his senior brother by doing projects. In his sophomore year, he and a few friends set up a studio and started a business outside, mostly making sculptures. In this process, he has to talk to the bosses about interests, delivery, and everything. Relying on these, Huang Jianyi basically did not spend his family's money in five years of college.
When creating "Building the Soul", Huang Jianyi pasted a sticky note on the table, which read: Make the last work. In Huang Jianyi's definition, a work means that it is not mixed with any commercial elements, but is completely born for personal expression. Just as he chose art and sculpture in the first place, purely for his liking.
He felt that it was unlikely that he would have such an opportunity after graduation, because he had to run for life. But the popularity of "Building the Soul" has brought unexpected opportunities to this ordinary young man in the past, even after two years.
On the weekend of Father's Day this year, Huang Jianyi went to Huizhou. A boss contacted Huang Jianyi through his senior brother and wanted to ask him to reproduce a work similar to "Building Souls" for collection. This time, Huang Jianyi considered it as an opportunity for himself to create again.
Will the next piece focus on workers or similar themes? The minibus asked. Huang Jianyi nodded slightly, that is still the source of his creation.
The power that grows out of the soil will never lose the life of the earth.
Source: Photographed by minibus
Group portrait of a construction worker family
Huang Jianyi's hometown is in Leizhou, Zhanjiang, Guangdong, very close to Hainan. When he was a child, he went to elementary school in the village, junior high school in the town, and high school in the county. He is the youngest child in the family, and has an older sister and two older brothers. My parents are construction workers, and they have to go to Hainan from their hometown to work every year, and they only go home once every two or three months.
Since elementary school, Huang Jianyi has taken care of each other's lives with his brothers and sisters. There are still tens of millions of such families in China.
On April 30 this year, the National Bureau of Statistics updated the "2023 Migrant Worker Monitoring Survey Report", and the number of migrant workers who went out was 176.58 million, an increase of 4.68 million from the previous year. From the perspective of industries, the number of people engaged in manufacturing and construction accounts for nearly 43% of the total, which is what we often call the worker group.
Hainan is a tourist resort, picturesque, giving birth to many real estate companies to develop real estate, Huang Jianyi's parents, is the "nutrients" of these buildings that grow up from the flat land, and the same nutrients, there are the same as Huang's parents, hundreds of millions of workers.
Huang Jianyi counted the years, from the time his father was seventeen or eighteen years old, for nearly 40 years, his father has been living like this, year after year, day after day, carrying bricks in the construction site, doing all the things that construction workers have to do.
In the past 40 years, China has also experienced the world's largest and fastest urbanization process.
The total urban population has increased from 240 million in 1984 to 920 million in 2022, and the level of urbanization has increased from 23% to 65.2%. The number of cities in China has increased from about 300 in 1984 to more than 600 today, and it has gradually formed an international metropolis in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
In this process, construction workers like Huang Jianyi's father are the "marginal figures" of the city in the public eye, the "ants" carried by the rickets, but they are also the steel skeleton of the city. In the 80s, the number of construction workers in China was about 6 million, and today, the number of construction workers in China exceeds 50 million.
Construction workers
After forty years, a generation of construction workers has turned from green silk to white hair. After the work became popular, Huang Jianyi learned the news that his father fell ill on the construction site.
Huang Jianyi put his left palm on his right chest, and then said, "Dad, there is something wrong with his heart here." His mother later described the situation to him: it was like a chopstick standing straight on the ground, suddenly breaking and then falling. He said as he picked up his chopsticks to demonstrate.
Talking about the reason for his father's illness, Huang Jianyi said that it may be that the working hours are too long and tiring, or the sanitary conditions at the construction site are too poor. Whether it is the work intensity, the length of time or the working environment, it is a concrete living situation of construction workers and even workers who are well known, and we do not need to repeat it. What should be concerned is how to better implement the provisions of the instrument.
Regarding his father, Huang Jianyi also told another story. He said that after graduating from high school, he was going to work on his father's construction site with him — and his eldest brother did the same. But after the eldest brother, his father resolutely did not allow Huang Jianyi to follow him to work on the construction site.
"No parent wants their child to suffer, especially after seeing their child suffer. This is the characteristic of Chinese parents, who can endure a lot of hardships, but always hope that their children can be more relaxed. Speaking of these, Huang Jianyi's tone became heavy, and his eyes were unbearable.
Two years ago, the minibus had a conversation with several construction workers in Hangzhou. Lao Yao, a scaffolding worker from Gansu, has been working alone at the construction site in Hangzhou to earn money to support his family, and a glass of wine at the dinner table and a cigarette after dinner are the biggest pastimes in his life. The son of Baoyan Harbin Institute of Technology, and the daughter who is studying at Lanzhou University are the biggest motivation for his hard work.
With the efforts of one generation, we will lift the second generation upward. Not limited to the group of construction workers, this is the living situation of the vast majority of working-class families in China. And the second generation that they have done their best to hold up will not surprisingly squeeze into the torrent of the city, struggle and survive, and become the screws in the new round of urbanization.
Construction site, a corner of the urbanization process
"Migrating" with the Economic Cycle
In another year, Huang Jianyi's father will be 60 years old. 60 years old, in the group of construction workers, belongs to the overage workers.
In 2022, a wave of construction industry clearance orders was set off in many regions across the country. The key to dismissal is overage construction workers over the age of 60. In the Interim Measures of the State Council on the Retirement and Retirement of Workers, the upper age limit is even lower, 55 for men and 45 for women.
Although the regulations and policies are based on safety concerns and rights protection, for the construction workers, this kind of retreat is a blow to their lives, because they still have to earn money to support their families. For most workers who do not have the skills and knowledge to do so, as they get older, the work on the construction site is already rare, although tired, as long as they are willing to work, they can also make money.
If it weren't for the accident, Huang Jianyi's father might have continued to work on the construction site. Even though all four children in the family are grown up and able to live independently. In fact, even after my father's illness, my mother did not stop working.
Now, Huang Jianyi's father has returned to his hometown to help Huang Jianyi's eldest sister take care of the children, which can be regarded as a retirement life with a tease on his grandson. Three sons, scattered in the city of Guangdong, work and live. Huang Jianyi's eldest brother is in Foshan, and his second brother is in Guangxi. Life is quite happy.
Huang Jianyi's parents can be said to be a clear representative of China's first generation of workers. In China's urbanization process, they move from the countryside to the cities, and because of the lack of knowledge and technology, they often have to exchange time and manual labor for the lowest cost. The Pearl River Delta region, where Huang Jianyi lives, is an important area in the process of urbanization, with factories and high-rise buildings rising from the ground, and countless migrant groups squeezing into Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Foshan, and Dongguan to work and make a living.
Workers rushing to work
Source: Photographed by minibus
Today, cities have begun to roll towards "high-tech", smart equipment has eliminated repetitive labor, high-rise buildings are saturated, and enterprises have turned overseas due to the rising costs of land and labor.
Because the company he works for belongs to the manufacturing industry, Huang Jianyi is also familiar with the current situation of factories and workers. Huang Jianyi said about a company he worked for, the factory chose to move to Vietnam, leaving only a few technicians, and the workers in the factory were disbanded on the spot. "Formal companies will also compensate [workers], and the worse ones will not get anything."
After the disbandment, the workers may stay and continue to look for the next factory, or they may go to the next city. Under the high cost of urban life, it is difficult for a place where you have worked and lived for more than ten years or decades to become a home for workers. They are like migratory birds, migrating around with the economic cycle. All that remained was a sigh.
As the "worker poet" Wu Xia wrote at the end of "My Sundress":
Many years later, craftsmen will build factories in another place, and migrant girls will come in again, this time, and the location will not be Shenzhen. The factory and the migrant girl stayed in the memory of the city of Shenzhen.
Editor's note
In Xiaoba's view, Huang Jianyi is a person who can toss, and he has the resilience and hard work of China's bottom.
In one sentence, Huang Jianyi, a child of a construction worker, took the road of artistic creation, and then used his own way to record and portray the "worker power" of China's development and progress, and he himself shows the most distinctive characteristics of young individuals in this era.
When I met Huang Jianyi, he had already registered a store on the cross-border e-commerce platform, prepared to design his own products, and then sell them overseas, starting another business, and he had already negotiated the foundry.
When he mentioned this, there was a light in his eyes, "If I want to sell well, I must be innovative." ”
At the end of the conversation, when asked about the future plan, Huang Jianyi's answer was full of confidence. He had already figured out what he was going to do for the future. The current work and life, Huang Jianyi called it a "transition period", is to give himself time to think and save some money, but it will not be a long-term solution. By the end of next year at the latest, he will leave Zhongshan and return to Guangzhou or Shenzhen, and then choose a job he likes to accumulate resources and contacts. Further into the future, he may still have to start his own business.
As he walked out of the Guangmei graduation exhibition, Huang Jianyi passed by a white wall with a quote from Borges written on it.
"Time is a labyrinth in a straight line."
At the corner of the wall, there is a faint white light, which is the exit of the exhibition.
Source: Photographed by minibus
The author of this article | Tian Weifeng | Editor-in-Charge | He Mengfei
Editor-in-Chief | He Mengfei | Image source | VCG