Art

Last of China's Lotus Feet Women

As the last generation of Chinese women with bound feet ages into their final decades, Jo Farrell set out to photograph the survivors of this brutal beauty tradition.

Allison Meier

March 23, 2015 — 3 min read

Jo Farrell, portrait of Zhang Yun Ying, age 77 (2005) (all photographs courtesy the artist)

As the last generation of Chinese women with bound feet ages into their final decades, Jo Farrell set out to photograph the survivors of this brutal beauty tradition. Their toes contorted and flattened, their heels pulled tight into a bracing arch, these “lotus feet” are now wrinkled by time and a life not of luxury, but of labor.

As farmers in the rural areas of the Shandong and Yunnan provinces, the depicted women are far from the fabled courtesans wearing dainty silk embroidered shoes over their gnarled toes. They lived through an often obligatory tradition that mutilated their feet in order to meet the standards of subservience to get a husband, through the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s that upheaved so much of China, through to today when the rural regions are thinned by massive relocation to the cities.

Jo Farrell, The straw shoes of Su Xi Rong, age 75 (2008)

It’s that quiet dignity and pride of the individual women that Farrell captured in her project Living History: Bound Feet Women of China, which launches as a book today at the British Council in Hong Kong. Using her Hasselblad to take black and white photographs over a period of eight years, her images show the often shocking details of the women’s twisted feet, but also their homes and everyday lives.

The practice of bound feet dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 CE). It was finally outlawed in 1912, although like any cultural custom that endured across classes for centuries it didn’t stop overnight. The women photographed by Farrell are now in their 80s and 90s, having their feet bound when they were between three and 11 years old. Several of the around 50 women Farrell photographed have since died, and there’s an urgency in her photographs to capture the lives of this generation along with their feet. In addition to taking their portraits, she also asked them for their stories, inviting a voice into work that with a less empathetic eye could easily become spectacle.

Body modification and pain for beauty imposed on women is hardly isolated to China’s imperial history, although it’s one of the extremes. The gentle step in which they’ve walked their whole lives is demonstrated in this video. At no point in the Living History project does Farrell frame her subjects as victims. The women reveal their warped, worn flesh to the lens with a pride of their own endured history.