Peasantography

This series addresses the situation of the 61 million Chinese Left Behind Children in the countryside, who are raised up by their grandparents, who are from a very different, harsh, Maoist generation, and miss out on the intimacy of daily life with their parents, whom they often see only once a year on holidays. In China, the household registration system was introduced in 1955 after the establishment of People’s Republic of China to classify all people in the whole country as either agricultural (rural) or nonagricultural (urban). These classifications differentiate the people’s rights and privileges. The system is critical in giving people access to good jobs, education, housing, health care, and even the right to move to another city. Due to the Household Registration System, the rural children don't have the same rights to access to education in the cities, which forced them to be left behind in the rural areas with their grandparents or great grandparents. These images are interwoven with a portrait of the children with their grandparents, a portrait of their parents, train tickets and an image of their house as the woven background. The train tickets all speak to a sense of separation yet a desire for togetherness and familial bonding. Using the train tickets as a vertical element in most pictures which divides the parents from the children. The concept of the train is something that could seemingly unite the families, but here that symbol of unity is used as a dividing formal element.