Bound Foot

Liu Hung

1948–2021

Bound Foot, 1992

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: photolithograph

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 422 x 617 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 573 x 762 mm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 16 5/8 x 24 5/16 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 22 9/16 x 30 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 24 x 32 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Art Fund

Accession number: 1993.0301

Not on display

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Past Presence

In the early 1990s, Hung Liu began creating prints and paintings that appropriate imagery from a trove of late 19th- and early 20thcentury photographs that she found on a trip back to her native China. In Bound Foot, she reproduces a photographic portrait of a woman whose feet are exposed to reveal the effects of foot binding, the historical practice of breaking and tightly wrapping young girls’ feet to alter their size and shape. Liu places this photograph in conversation with a historical anatomical illustration of a cross-section of the human body. Bound Foot both questions the meaningfulness of documentary materials and suggests the possibility of using them as a pathway to new interpretations of the past.

Under Construction

Liu Hung addresses the past and present status of Chinese women and her own identity as a Chinese-American by appropriating images of anonymous women, historical figures, her family, and herself. Liu found this photograph of a woman with bound feet in an album containing images of China taken by foreigners at the turn of the twentieth century. Before the government banned the custom of foot binding in 1912, it was popular in China as a sign of high class as well as a symbol of beauty. However, the practice also immobilized and confined women. Liu employs this image to suggest the physical and mental constraints of Chinese women in contemporary society by juxtaposing it with an anatomical diagram. After immigrating to the United States in 1984, Liu tried to leave behind her memories of the Cultural Revolution as well as her life in China, but this photograph reminded her of her personal and cultural past in China.

Exhibition Label: “Embodiment,” Nov-2005, Kate Meyer Hung Liu’s art addresses the exploitation of women in China, a concern that is illustrated here in her appropriation of an early-twentieth-century photograph of a woman exposing her bound feet with a line drawing of a female figure without arms or legs. Although the practice of foot binding was banned in 1911, by framing the early photograph and the contemporary drawing together, Liu creates a metaphor that suggests the continued physical and inevitable mental constraints placed on Chinese women in contemporary society. Exhibition Label: "Modernisms: Late/Post," Mar-1997, Deborah J. Wilk Since immigrating to the United States in 1984, Liu has been interested in what she calls the "cultural collisions" between East and West, especially in the representations of women. In Bound Foot, Liu reproduces a photograph of a turn-of-the-century Chinese prostitute next to a seventeenth-century Chinese medical illustration. According to Liu, male Western photographers "changed Chinese photography" when they "brought cameras to China, took pictures of Chinese and brought them back to the United States. The Chinese male photographers internalized this Western male gaze, and turned their cameras on their own women, particularly these young prostitutes for sale.