The Land of Promises (2017 - 2020)
Youqine Lefèvre’s The Land of Promises is a moving account of the artist’s own family history. Through family photos and home videos, the project narrates the journey of six Belgian families who traveled to China in 1994 to adopt children from an orphanage in Hunan Province, one of whom was the artist herself. The work straddles the personal and the political, the intimate and the public, as it navigates the nuances of China’s birth-control policy, implemented between 1979 and 2015, and in particular the one-child policy which limited Chinese families to a single child, by constitutional mandate with few exceptions.
With memories mediated through retellings by Lefèvre’s adoptive father, as well as the five other adoptive parents, plus official documents, photographs, and videos from the group’s travels in 1994 and from her own trips back to China, in 2017 and 2019, the artist invites us to explore with her the implications of China’s family-planning policies and their enduring legacy. We also delve into a personal probe of the notions of nation, home, and belonging.
In what she describes as a “testimony of a desire to discover and reconnect, to reclaim one’s own story”, we learn how memory-making can be a changeable collective practice, subject to the whims of imperial memory, as we reach back into the moments that formed Lefèvre’s life.
Text: Renée Akitelek Mboya
2024 Group show, When Images Take Care, Centre de la Photographie, Geneva (CH)
2024 Group show, Meditations on Love, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (UK)
2024 Group show, Belfast Photo festival, Belfast (UK)
2024 Group show, Young Artists Prize of the Parliament of the WBF, Brussels (BE)
2023 22nd Biennal Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (BR)
2022 Women Photographers Grant, Phmuseum, honourable mention (IT)
2022 Paris Photo – Aperture First PhotoBook Award, shortlisted (US)
2022 Solo show, L’image sans Nom, Liège (BE)
2022 The Land of Promises, The Eriskay Connection
2022 Plat(t)form, Fotomuseum Winterthur, special mention (CH)
2022 Group show, Festival de l’Image de Stavelot, Stavelot (BE)
2022 Group show, Les femmes s’exposent, Houlgate (FR)
2021 TalentWall #7, Pennings Foundation, Eindhoven (NL)
2021 Group show, .tiff #9, FOMU, Antwerp (BE)
2020 Group show, reGeneration4, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (CH)
