Youqine Lefèvre (b. 1993, CN) is a Belgian visual artist currently based in Brussels, Belgium. Her artistic practice, combining photography, archives, video, text and research, is an exploration of the relationship between the intimate and the political.
Her work focuses on the declining birth rate in East Asia with the aim of deconstructing Western stereotypes over these territories, their population and culture. With a strong interest in demography and sociology and as an artist of Asian descent who grew up in Belgium, she brings a unique critical eye to these issues.
Through individual stories - both her own and those of others - she looks for ways to tell the intimate while at the same time distancing herself in order to study an issue as a whole. Her first book, The Land of Promises, published by the Dutch independent publisher The Eriskay Connection, is about the Chinese birth control policy and the artist's international and transracial adoption. It brings together the 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 has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture First PhotoBook Award 2022.
© Anne-Sophie Guillet