Photography, 2023
Missing Woman is my latest practice responding to the history and legacy of foot binding.
I visited the Surgeons’ Hall Museums and was confronted by preserved bound feet, smaller than the size of my palm. The scale shocked me. It was not only the physical distortion that unsettled me, but the intimacy of it. A life reduced to an object that could fit into a display case.
I was there with my Chinese friend Yanbing. She shared that her great grandmother once took pride in her bound feet, believing it was a mark of dignity and privilege, something only girls from wealthy or upper class families could receive. That pride sits uneasily with the pain embedded in the body. Violence disguised as honour. Suffering translated into status.
This work reflects on how such standards are absorbed, repeated, and defended by the very people they harm. It questions how many women continue to suffer under imposed ideals of beauty, virtue, and value, and how often the loss of the self is mistaken for devotion or success.
The piece also carries a quiet satire. We are often told to put ourselves in someone else’s place, to put ourselves in their shoes. But what if those shoes are made to deform the body. What if they are designed to limit movement, agency, and voice. What does empathy mean when the structure itself is violent.
Missing Woman speaks to disappearance. The gradual vanishing of autonomy. The erasure of the body’s truth. Women are asked to sacrifice themselves for others, for tradition, for desire, for approval. In doing so, the woman herself becomes absent.
She is missing, not because she is gone, but because she has been reshaped until she can no longer fully exist.