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BiographyAowen Kitaika Jin was born in the year when the 'One Child Policy' and economic reforms were first implemented in China. She became the first generation to be able to continue her higher education outside of China after the Cultural Revolution. She came to Britain for it's cultural, political and geographic importance in the Western world.
Playing the obedient 'only child', Aowen first chose to study a prosperous Law and Economics degree in Durham University. However, Western perspectives had made her more aware of her individuality and her lifetime passion for art, and she left to start at Goldsmith's College, London.
During Aowen's time in Goldsmith's, she competed with qualified and experienced teachers to become the youngest and first foreign art teacher in Holloway Prison (the largest female prison in Europe). In her final year, Aowen was selected to produce an art work for Her Majesty's Eightieth Birthday, along with other commissions. Her work now resides in The Queen's private collection.
After graduation, Aowen was approached by numerous galleries, and exhibited her works for private collectors in London, LA, Tokyo and China. Her art and life was featured in a serial documentary on prominent Yorkshire Artists alongside Henry Moore and Damien Hirst.
In 2006, aware of her lack of experience and skills in life, Aowen went on to set up a company dealing the with Chinese communities in London, which also gave her the opportunity to travel around Far East Asia, especially in China and Japan, and encounter life changing events. She sold the business after three successful years to firmly focus her energy back on her art career.
About the Exhibition
Since being introduced in 1978, China's One-Child Policy has created international debate and controversy, and spawned one-billion single child families. As the first generation born under the policy reach child-bearing age, China is gearing up to review its future in October 2010.
The exhibition analyses the One-Child Policy from the perspective of the first generation women to be born as single children, and how the effects have impacted their lives - especially how it shapes their individuality, personalities, experience and expectations. In it, the artist argues that the policy has created a generation of “Little Empresses” who were born into a world where they were cherished and doted on like no generation before. Now that these children themselves are under pressure to start a family – both from society and the state – they are finding themselves making sacrifices that they were never prepared for and many are reluctant to make.
The exhibition was researched by interviewing 300 Chinese women. The interview subjects included the first generation of mothers who gave birth under the One-Child Policy; the first generation of urban daughters born under the policy; and the first generation of rural daughters born under the policy. 95% of the women came from the Han population, while 5% came from ethnic minority groups. Academic Comments on Exhibition and One Child Policy
"Singleton urban daughters have greatly benefited from the extra resources and attention their parents have been able to give them, contributing to changed expectations of girls’ educational and professional attainment and filial responsibilities, with radical implications for family, interpersonal and gendered relationships. Alongside the increasing individualization of Chinese society, the separation of reproduction from sexuality implicit in birth control policy has also contributed to giving young women access to decisions that their mothers could not have dreamt of, including not marrying, not having children, cohabiting with boyfriends and having same-sex relationships. Yet gendered expectations of young women to be modern versions of ‘good wives and virtuous mothers’ are still prevalent, and even if many young urban women do not see themselves in this mold, the pressures on them to marry and bring up children continue to carry with them normative gender and family values complicating their choices. Many young rural women have also benefited from the birth limitations imposed by the state. However, in rural areas where patrilineal structures of marriage and inheritance still dominate, economic and cultural pressures to bear children, and particularly sons, remain heavy. Women’s bodies are not now targeted as they were during the coercive high-tide of the policy during the mid-1980s, but rural women continue to bear the brunt of the policy. It is women who have to sustain family pressures and repeated births—sometimes including sex-selective abortions—before producing a son, who have to withstand social prejudice for their failure to reproduce the male line, and who develop ways of evading the authorities’ attention for having had over-quota numbers of children. Though research still has to be done to find out how many of the young women who migrate to the cities for work do so, in part, to escape future child-bearing and domestic pressures, the availability of marriageable rural men—one result of the gendered imbalances produced by the one-child policy—is often not lure enough to make them return. Across urban and rural areas, and in the flow of local and global forces transforming China, the one-child policy contributes to new and often liberating choices while bringing with it confusion and conflict."
Harriet Evans, Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster. Evans is author of The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
“The One Child Policy was born from a 1970s political panic engineered by pseudo-scientific projections from in vogue cybernetic modellers. In the wake of the disastrous Cultural Revolution, the policy justified as necessary for China to become modern and wealthy provided the Chinese Communist Party with an entirely new way of imposing itself on the Chinese population...The policy has shaped perception of women of their own bodies, political authority, and the state is undoubted, but yet remains fully unexplored. This is why the Jin Aowen's exhibition marks a milestone event.”
Prof. Hans van de Ven, Chair of Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; professor of Modern Chinese History, University of Cambridge
“Urban daughters have benefited from the demographic pattern produced by China's one-child policy. In the system of patri-lineal kinship that has long characterized most of Chinese society, parents had little incentive to invest in their daughters. Singleton daughters, however, enjoy unprecedented parental support because they do not have to compete with brothers for parental investment. Low fertility enabled mothers to get paid work and thus, gain the ability to demonstrate their filiality by providing their own parents with financial support. Because their mothers have already proven that daughters can provide their parents with old age support, and because singletons have no brothers for their parents to favor, daughters have more power than ever before to defy disadvantageous gender norms while using equivocal ones to their own advantage.” (China's One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters)
Dr. Vanessa L. Fong, Harvard's Graduate School of Education – a leading researcher on the impact of the One-Child Policy on the first single-child generation.
“As burning an issue as the varied implications of the One Child Policy may be in certain parts of China, this is not universally so. In the remote and under-resourced borderland areas where many of China's minority populations reside, there has always been allowance for more children.”'Women's Empowerment in Muslim Contexts' (DFID funded research, 2006-10)
Dr Maria Jaschok: Director of International Gender Studies Centre, University of Oxford
“Tight government control of childbearing in China has had both positive and negative effects on women and girls. Positive effects: Women are living longer lives, yet are allowed to have only one or two children, which frees up most of their adult lives for further education, careers, full-time work, and other social, political, community, and family pursuits. Negative effects: The compulsory one-child is very intrusive for women. Women's bodies are not their own. Even though China has had a Communist government for over 60 years, the country's traditional system of near-universal marriage and childbearing remains fully intact. Families continue to put intense pressure on their sons and their daughters to marry and have one child or more than one. Today, nearly 100% of young women in China do marry, and almost all China's women bear one or more children."
Dr. Judith Banister, the Director of Global Demographics at The Conference Board and an influential author on China's population, employment and labour.
"Under Mao, who famously declared that “women hold up half the sky,” women were widely encouraged to take part in productive labour. Reproduction remained important, of course, but women’s roles were relatively balanced. Under the one-child policy introduced under Deng Xiaoping, the pendulum has shifted back to reproduction. Since the late 1970s, women’s sacred duty to their families and to the nation has been to produce a child – a single perfect child (or, for some, two perfect children).
“For the current generation of young women, the first born under the one-child policy, this overwhelming state and societal pressure to focus on producing and raising children is confusing because the rapid marketization of recent decades has brought a proliferation of opportunities to contribute to China’s economic development in a myriad of ways never before possible. Moreover, young women today are the most highly educated generation of women in Chinese history and thus well equipped to play important roles in China’s economic and political life in the 21st Century.
“What role will young women be permitted to play in China’s globalization? Will conservative views of women’s duties rooted in their “biological nature,” combined with state pressure on them to upgrade the quality of China’s workforce, require them to devote most of their energies to childrearing? Or will they find creative ways to combine work with mothering and, if so, how will they balance the two? Or will they reject marriage and mothering altogether and devote their energies to work and service? This important exhibition provides some answers to these critical questions."
Prof. Susan Greenhalgh, Department of Anthropology, University of CaliforniaOfficial Statistics on Impact of the One-Child Policy
The One-Child Policy is one of the Five Fundamental Policies of the People's Republic of China, along with the Environmental Policy, Farming Protection Policy, Education Policy and Open Door Policy. It only applies to Han Chinese – not those in the 55 other ethnic groups (8.5% of the population).
While most families are only eligible to have one child, a couple where both the wife and husband are single children are eligible to have two children. In some rural areas it is allowed to have a second child after a gap of several years.
The following statistics are from the Annual Government Statistics Reports from the People's Republic of China, comparing 1978 to 2009.
Birth Rate
Since 1978 the birth rate has declined from 2.9 to 1.5 children per family. In the city it is currently 1.2, while in the countryside (where 80% of the population reside) it is 1.7. An Oxford University publication recently stated that a rate of 2.1 would be necessary to maintain population levels – and as such the low birth rate is putting pressure on state resources.
Marriage Rate
In 1978 the marriage rate was 2.1%, and it is 1.1% in 2009. Chinese Huan Qui News suggests that women are delaying their marriages in pursuit of career achievements.
No-Birth Rate
The number of women who did not have a child has increased from 3% in 1978 to 12.5% in 2009. Scholars quoted in People's News suggested that this is due to infertility from failed abortions, as women are attempting to ensure that they have a son rather than a daughter.
Male to Female Ratio
The current male to female ratio in China is 117:100. By comparison in India – where male children are also preferred to females – the imbalance is just 108:100. In both countries some couples use legal and illegal means to ensure that their child is male, and female foetuses are aborted or sometimes female babies are left exposed to die.
Abortion Rate
According to an article in the China Daily newspaper, there are 13 million recorded abortions each year – although many more are unrecorded.
Press Quotes
Past Collections
Exhibition LocationPrivate View: Tuesday 14th September 2010, 6-10pm
Collector's Private View: Monday 13th September 2010
By appointment only - for bookings contact Alison Johnson or 07948 996 146.
Artspace Gallery, 18 Maddox Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 1PL.
Art Space Gallery is five minutes walk from Oxford Circus station. It is on Maddox Street, which is just off Regent Street, in the direction of Piccadilly Circus.
Exhibition PreviewExhibition LocationPrivate View: Tuesday 14th September 2010, 6-10pm
Artspace Gallery, 18 Maddox Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 1PL. Directions
Exhibition Lectures with Video Documentary
Exhibition lectures by the artist run from from 6.30pm to 7.30pm on the following days during the exhibition:
Exhibition Private Views
Private View: Tuesday 14th September 2010
From 6-10pm. Everyone is welcome.
Collector's Private View: Monday 13th September 2010
By appointment only - for bookings contact Alison Johnson or 07948 996 146.
Artspace Gallery, 18 Maddox Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 1PL.
