Born in China in 1993, Youqine Lefèvre grew up in Belgium where she obtained a Bachelor degree in Visual Arts / at the ERG (École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels). She pursued her photographic studies at the École Supérieure d’Arts Appliqués in Vevey where she now lives. Her artistic work is essentially on humankind, childhood, memory, the family and its weaknesses. The series that made her known, Far from Home, is about the intimate search for identity, linked to the history of her own adoption, that transcends the dimension of simple testimony.
For three years, immersed in an isolated foster home in the Swiss Mountains, she photographed children. The latter, separated from their parents, incapable of taking care of them, matured prematurely because of the traumas they experienced and were in an in-between period that is shown by alternating black and white and colour. In these portraits, where innocence persists in spite of everything, Youqine Lefèvre manages to capture a moment of abandonment, an internal weakness, a vulnerability echoed by the landscapes. The pictures of rocks, recurrent in the series, testify to the talisman function assigned to them by the some of children of the home.
Bourse du talent 2017
15th December 2017 to 4th March 2018
Bibliothèque François Mitterrand
Quai François Mauriac
75706 Paris
France
