Samtan Art Mine

A shower room for a thousand miners

A communal shower room at Jeongam Mine once served more than a thousand workers after their shifts. Showerheads pointed in four directions. When the mine became Samtan Art Mine, X-ray images of miners' lungs were hung beneath the original plumbing. The room's former purpose was impossible to ignore

The same building had separate spaces for washing coal-covered boots and laundering work clothes. In its later role as an art complex, it retained much of that industrial equipment. An installation could occupy the same room as the machines and fittings that had once served working miners

A mine with a 53-metre tower

Jeongam Mine operated from 1964 until October 2001. Its main office was built into a slope, with a visitor entering at the apparent ground floor and then moving down through several levels of former offices and facilities. Coal had shaped the area's jobs and the household fuel supply for decades

The steel mine headframe rose 53 metres above the site. Two hoists carried miners and coal vertically, over a shaft reported to reach 653 metres. Rail carts, cables, conveyors and controls belonged to the original industrial system. Visitors to the art complex could inspect preserved equipment, but the shaft was never a public route into the deep workings

The offices kept another record of the mine. Employee wage statements, medical records and business papers were found among the administrative rooms. They connect the great hoist and the mine's output with individual working lives

Art made from the miners' lives

Samtan Art Mine opened in May 2013, using the old offices, washrooms and machinery halls as gallery space. The founder's collection was described as holding more than 100,000 works and objects from approximately 150 countries, though only a small fraction could be displayed at once

Some of the most telling works used the site's own material. A former industrial washing machine became part of an installation; wedding dresses once worn by miners' wives were used in another. The X-ray images in the showers made occupational exposure visible in a place designed to wash coal dust away. These were not interchangeable decorative additions: each depended on the working history of the room or the people associated with it

Other pieces had a deliberately different tone. A fourth-floor lounge displayed elongated comic figures and a hanging mobile featuring an apple motif. Their playfulness sat beside the mine's heavy infrastructure, showing how widely the art programme ranged

What survives the next rebuilding

The complex has been closed for structural work and exhibition redevelopment since November 2025. The county is pursuing reinforcement of the old buildings and has described a stronger future emphasis on the site's coal-mining heritage. That is a change of curatorial emphasis, although it does not establish that contemporary art will disappear

The distinction matters because the X-ray installation, the wedding-dress work and the former lounge displays may not be present in the reopened complex. No verified room-by-room or artwork retention plan has been published. They are documented examples of what the art mine once showed, not promises to future visitors

Before you go

*Public entry is suspended during reconstruction.* Earlier opening hours and ticket prices are no longer usable. Any tentative reopening date remains separate from confirmed visitor admission; the exhibits and route may change

Samtan stands in the Hambaeksan mountains above Gohan. The county tourism service is the source for any official reopening notice and revised access to the original showers, hoist and gallery buildings