The 2011 exhibition is made of two parts: a documentary and a sculpture.

The aim is to explore not only how things are made in China, but more importantly the personal stories of the people who are making them for us. The project follows the artist's progress in the cities of Yiwu (义乌) and Pujiang (浦江) where she will purchase the materials that make up a final sculptural piece. The scuplture will be exhibited in major cities to raise awareness and create discussion about the issue.

The name of the project "Made in Yi/Pu - a tale of two cities" is a play on the name of the famous book by Charles Dickens as well as the label 'Made in China'. Much of the hardship and suffering experienced by the book's characters during the industrial revolution mirrors the Western image of industry in China - which is only partly true. This exhibition aims to give more diverse and fascinating insights into 'Made in China' by presenting the up and downs of two cities and their habitants. It explores how human adaptation has allowed the Chinese to thrive in the current economic downturns.

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The Giver And The Taker

Two Left Feet

Aromasense

Private 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.

Private View: Tuesday 14th September 2010, 6-10pm
Artspace Gallery, 18 Maddox Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 1PL. Directions

Exhibition lectures by the artist run from from 6.30pm to 7.30pm on the following days during the exhibition:

• Monday: The Policy in Social Context


• Wednesday: The Two Worlds of Chinese Daughters


• Thursday: The Empowerment of Women - birth of the 'Little Empresses'


• Friday: Conflict between Duties and Dreams


• Saturday: What Comes Next for the Chinese Daughters?

Private View: Tuesday 14th September 2010
From 6-10pm. Please check availability.

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.

The documentary looks at what 'Made in China' means to the Chinese who are making goods for the international market. It goes beyond the conventional view of 'low quality products', 'cheap labour' and 'human rights abuse' to uncover the personal stories behind Chinese consumer goods.

The camera follows the artist's mission to find and choose one factory for her material. The artist departed from metropolitan Shanghai to the biggest wholesale market in the world - Yiwu (义乌) - where she shopped through over 62,000 stalls to search for the right material. Then she travelled to neighbouring Pujiang (浦江) - the crystal City of China, where 70% of the world's crystals are produced. Throughout the journey, the artist encounters a diverse range of people who all contribute to the chain of 'Made in China': the technicians who work 13 hours to produce the crystals; the shop owners who gamble together during work times; the migrant shoe cleaner whose whole family sleeps on one bed; the hotel security guard who has endless stories to tell to visitors; the travelling singers who charge £2 for a song at your dinner table; the multi-millionaire 'factory' owners; and many other lives.

By looking at two cities which are almost unknown to the West, yet which both play unique and important roles in the industries we all depend on, the artist shows us how those people thrive in extremely harsh conditions through human adaptation. Along the way, the camera uncovers the organic Chinese businesses which have never been shown to the West before; it shows the integrity and tenacity of these people; and it will raise concerns for their future as pollution worsens. Ultimately it will demonstrate how all of this links to our own future.

The sculpture of Made In Yi/Pu symbolises the lives and stories of the people along the artist's journey. It hopes to inspire consumers to think of the human lives behind the products which are 'Made in China'.

By showcasing the sculpture in galleries and across public places in London, the work aims to draw the public's attention and consideration to the origins of 'Made in China', and to create diverse discussion around the topic. The project will lead viewers to discover stories beyond the conventional views about the 'Made In China' label.

The sculpture aims to draw the 'people who buy' and the 'people who make' together.

Special thanks to the academics who took the time to provide comments and analysis for exhibition The Giver and The Taker, Unmasking The Truth of the One-Child Policy. (By British Chinese Artist in London)

Prof. Susan Greenhalgh - Department of Anthropology, University of California

"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."

Dr. Judith Banister - Director of Global Demographics at The Conference Board and an influential author on China's population, employment and labour

“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."

Harriet Evans - Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster.

"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."

Prof. Hans van de Ven - Chair of Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; professor of Modern Chinese History, University of Cambridge

“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.”

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.

“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 Maria Jaschok - Director of International Gender Studies Centre, University of Oxford

“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)

Chinese Artist in London, Britain

coming soon

Chinese Artist in London, Britain

coming soon

Why is contemporary Chinese culture fascinating?

Being the fastest growing economy in the world, China is changing at an unprecedented rate. The economic growth brings out the conflicts between traditional Confucian values and materialism; it widens the gaps between the rich and poor; it encourages greed which deepens and worsens corruption and bribery; it constantly shifts the landscape as new construction happens 24 hours a day across the country; it fuels the biggest human migration each year as billions of Chinese farmers leave their villages for the cities in search of a 'better and richer' live; and with the wealth it brings to China, it also brings the biggest eviromental problems - unmatched anywhere else in the world.

The clash of foreign and traditional; the clash of greed and honesty; the clash of young and old; the clash of rich and poor - all are boiling in a pot containing 1.3 billion people. This produces new social phenomenon at lighting speed - some disappear as quickly as they emerge but many last and form the start of new cultures. And if the cultures survive this far, they still have to find a way to exist under the watchful eyes of a strictly controlled government.

Why are Western and Chinese media portraits of Chinese culture frustrating?

Western media has the habit of only focusing on the negative aspects of China, while Chinese media only likes to use unsophisticated propaganda to promote China. However, whatever issue they are reporting on has complexed and diverse angles. That's why my mission is to present different aspects of any contemporary Chinese cultural shift by researching deep into its roots.