‘The Land of Promises’ tells the intimate and personal stories of those living by the regulations of China’s one-child policy. Between the years 1979 and 2015, China took an excessive approach towards a critical population growth. The consequences of these controversial regulations were enormous, in particular for hundreds of thousands Chinese girls who were separated from their biological families and registered for adoption. Photographer Youqine Lefèvre is one of those girls. 

In 1994, six Belgian families, including Youqine Lefèvres’s adoptive father, travelled across China to adopt girls. Youqine Lefèvres was born in Hunan Province in 1993 and adopted at the age of eight months. According to official documents she stayed with her biological family for a month before they left her in a city called Yueyang. A resident found her and dropped her off at the police station. The authorities handed her to the orphanage and reportedly searched for her parents for four months. She lived in the orphanage for seven months before she was adopted. 

Youqine Lefèvres has no recollection of what preceded her adoption or of the meeting between the parents and children at the orphanage. Her ‘memory’ of the event has been mediated through the stories of her father and the other parents, along with the photographs and videos they made and official documents. 

‘The Land of Promises’ is a work about the discovery of Youqine Lefèvrese’s origin country and an attempt to understand what led to the abandonment and international and transracial adoptions of countless young Chinese girls. The changes in their lives resonate upon this day and will continue to do so.

The exhibition presents an excerpt of the project, consisting of photographs Youqine took in China, archives from 1994, research based on writing of demographers and experts on the Chinese birth control policy, and the stories and testimonies told by those she met in China during her travels in 2017 and 2019.

The project can be viewed in its entirety in the artist’s Photobook, of the same name, ‘The Land of Promises’.

Artist Bio:

Youqine Lefèvre (b.1993, China) is a Belgian visual artist currently living and working in Namur, Belgium. Her artistic practice, combining photography, archives and video, is situated between documentary and intimate. Her first book, The Land of Promises, focuses on the Chinese birth control policy and the artist's international and transracial adoption. It brings together themes that have always been present in her work: family, childhood and memory. Starting from a personal story, the subject broadens to become societal, social, political, cultural and economic. The book was shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture First PhotoBook Award 2022.