Women in the Middle: Motherhood Voices and Transforming Reproductive Policies in China

#media-art #multimedia-installation #childbirth-policy

Women in the Middle is a uterus-shape installation that demonstrates China’s changing fertility policies over the past four decades and documents women’s personal perceptions using audio and visual components. How will the fate of the individual, and the fate of the mother, be influenced and determined when the texture of the uterus is shaped by the reproductive policy of the state? The presence of both state-level policies and personal-level opinions aims to give the audience a glimpse of how China’s transforming fertility policies impact the lives of individual women. Ultimately, this installation asks the audience to contemplate the consequences of depriving women of and empowering them with reproductive rights.

Advised by: Anna Greenspan, Eric Parren, Jingtian Zong

Work Type
Multimedia Installation, 3m x 2.5m x 2m

Exhibition
Capstone Show, NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, 2022

Role
Individual Undergrad Thesis + Fellow Research

01. Outcome

The core of this project is the perceptions and opinions selected from interviews with eleven Chinese women from different ages, all of which can be found in this document. Consent has been obtained for content sharing. The following are some selected snippets:

- But the policy is still the decisive factor, if there is no second (third) child policy, it is certainly impossible to have another child. The policy is the prerequisite.
- I was fourteen when my parents accidentally had a second child, and then because the universal second-child policy had not been enacted at that time (2014), my mother had to hide in another city to give birth to my brother after she looked pregnant.
- A lot of what was said about the one-child policy came from the propaganda, which at that time was promoted as if there was no harm in having just one child. The propaganda would say how much the family planning policy could reduce the population of the earth and how much contribution it could make.
- I think our one-child generation is very unusual. We're the only generation that has been like this for so many years in China or even in the worldwide.