Portraits of China in Flux

In 1979, the Chinese government introduced a program that would have sweeping effects on Chinese society: the one-child policy.

Intended by the Chinese Communist Party as a measure to limit population growth by restricting parents to a single child, the policy remained in force until 2016, when it was replaced by a two-child limit. This was later amended to three children per family.

Painter Wang Jinsong observed the impact of this policy firsthand while working as an art teacher in Beijing in the 1990s. He turned to photography to provoke reflection on the long-term consequences of the policy, inviting his students and their families to sit for portraits in his studio. The 200 photographs that resulted from this project became his work Standard Family.

Standard Family was recently on view at the Getty Center as part of the ongoing series In Dialogue, which pairs contemporary photographs with historical works. Jinsong’s work was shown alongside painter Quiringh Gerritsz van Brekelenkam’s Family Group in an Interior, a 17th-century Dutch genre scene that depicts a family preparing for church. Together, they invite viewers to reflect on the ways in which artists have represented the domestic sphere, as well as the relationships between the individual and society.

Jinsong recently talked about how he came to make Standard Family, his approach to portraiture, and his thoughts on the impact of the one-child policy on contemporary China.

Wang Jinsong

I created Standard Family in 1996. At the time, I was teaching oil painting at the Beijing Institute of Education to adults taking continuing education classes. Many of my students had young children. I made a form, inviting my students and their kids over for the project. The students were enthusiastic. They liked it because I was going to make portraits of their families.

I didn’t instruct the families to pose in any particular way. They understood that it was a typical studio portrait and arranged themselves. In previous years in China, most families had a lot of kids. But by then, due to the one-child policy, they had only one, so the child came in the middle naturally. Because most Chinese parents thought their child was a precious treasure.

I originally began taking the photographs as preparatory material for oil paintings. But later, while working on the paintings, I found it more real and powerful to express my ideas using photography.

For me, the grid is really important. A photograph of one family can only say so much, but when each individual family comes together, repeating the same structure over and over again, that’s a society. By presenting 200 images in a grid, they could make a broader statement.

When my students saw their photographs in the grid, they were pleased because they thought of themselves as part of one big family—their small family, coming together with others as part of the larger Chinese collective. They were proud to be included in the work. I gave each of them a copy of it afterward.

In a recent exhibition at the Beijing Times Art Museum, I chose to present Standard Family on a larger scale, wrapping it around multiple walls as a floor-to-ceiling piece. I wanted to make the photographs about the same size as viewers, so that when people are looking at them, they can feel this strong power of vision. That way they can also sense the scale of the one-child policy, which is beyond the level of the individual.

The one-child policy has had a major impact on Chinese society, changing the traditional structure of the family. With only one child, there will be no uncles, aunts, and cousins in the future. Losing the relatives in this way means that the family, going forward, will just be one straight line down.

In my view, it was a terrible policy. It was a sudden interruption of natural development, affecting the way humans normally and naturally give birth. When they spotted the social problems arising from it, they tried hard to fix it. However, I think the impact on Chinese society is huge. Even with the shift to a two-child policy in 2016, and more recently, to the three-child limit, the impact will be felt for some time.

Seeing Standard Family alongside Van Brekelenkam’s Family Group in an Interior, I am reminded of what we used to have in China, even in ancient times—extended families, with brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. I think there’s a sharp contrast there, to put those two works together. It gets people thinking about the impact of the policy and the nature of family.