Introduction
In Studio, I had been investigating the identity of women in different ways. I looked up different dressing styles of the women and the customs that the women should follow in different countries during different eras. I also looked up the living artists who are focusing on the work of identity especially feminism. I collected materials and did three correlations of this topic. They were a veil hat(image 1), a jewelry box(image 2), and a rouge container(image 3) and were each made out of a red gauze, a toiletry’s container, and a heart-shaped container. After this process of making, I wanted to focus on the customs of the women in Chinese culture in my final project.
The two artists who are inspiring me are Xiuwen Cui and Jing Xiang. They are both Chinese artists who worked at the artworks that are mainly related to female identity.
Proposal 1
I want to make a dress that is related to women in the Qing Dynasty. In this dress, I will use the retro, satin fabric to restore the style of dressing during that era.
For my prototype, I do not have the resources yet, since I have to go to a little studio that my sister is working at to get the machine and the fabrics in order to make a dress, so I just used a piece of fabric that my sister took home to me. I put it on a decoration in my house, which I thought it looks like a model. I made it fit to this model and surprisingly I think it was kind of a performance art to do after I took the pictures.
Proposal 2
I want to make a pair of small three-inch shoes. Three-inch shoes have a great influence on women in ancient China. At that time, women had to bind their feet when they were young. Their feet were forced to stop growing, deformed, and ended up wearing a pair of three-inch shoes and suffered pain when walking. I’m planning to use the fabrics also to make the shoes, and I might put the dirt in the fabric of strips to wind them up. Then I will unwind them, and it will leave the shoes dirty, which implies that the women who suffered this custom cannot get rid of the pain. The shoes won’t be as clean as before even after they are washed.
For my prototype, I found a pair of my shoes and used a white silk cloth to bind the shoes. I cut the cloth into strips, which I think looks like the bandage or the fabric that the women would use to bind their feet. Then I bent the shoes into half of the size and used the strip to wind them.
Foot binding
After talking with Bryan, I decided to use the second proposal as the final project that I’ll be working on, which is to make a pair of three-inched shoes.
I continued to research on the history of foot binding in China and found many meaningful resources.
The purpose of foot binding is to limit the growth of feet. Therefore, the younger women started binding feet, the better result it would be, because children’s feet are soft and easy to bind since they are still growing. Women usually began to bind their feet when they were four or five years old. Foot binding is one of the important manifestations of the oppression of women in feudal society in China.
Because women couldn’t walk too much from foot binding. In the beginning, men wanted to keep women chaste and restrict their activities, so that foot binding would keep women have no contact with the outside world. But the main reason of foot binding is to satisfy men’s sexual needs. Similar to women wearing high heels nowadays, when women are walking with high heeled shoes their walking posture will be very enchanting. The ancient people believed that because a woman’s feet were small, their walking posture would be delicate and charming, which would allow a man to imagine thronged his mind of more strange desires.
In the era of foot binding, women began to bind their feet when they were four or five years old, and the cloth they used to bind their feet could not be removed until their bones were no longer growing until adulthood. But there were also women who had their feet bound for their whole life.
In my opinion, the custom of foot binding in ancient China reminds me of the custom of women tying their waists in western countries in the past. Most of these are from the society’s abnormal aesthetics of women or women’s disapproval of themselves, so they have to violate their own body’s original development mode and force their bodies to become the product of abnormal aesthetics. It would also leave these women with permanent trauma for the rest of their lives. I think this kind of customs should be banned permanently, and women should have their own healthy ways to pursue beauty, instead of letting society to decide how they should be like.
