Paintings depict loneliness of China's one-child policy

LifeSiteNews: The little boy’s face is that of 38 year-old Chinese painter Li Tianbing, taken from photos of himself as a child; the other little boys are his imaginary playmates, brothers and sisters who were never born, who populated his solitary life. Li’s work focuses consciously on the impact on individual lives of the country’s One Child Policy. He was five when the government issued it in 1979.

An exhibition of Li’s paintings, titled “A Game as Pretense of Being,” is currently in Paris, but could perhaps more appropriately have been titled, “A Childhood of One.” The focus is not on the large statistics whose immense scale can depersonalise, but on the policy’s impact on individual human lives. Children in China now, for the first time in the country’s history, know only the life of solitude. No one is allowed to have brothers and sisters, and there are no large families in a country where for thousands of years family was all.  See more of Li’s paintings here.