Chinese Lotus Shoes

Exploring the Cultural Prestige of Chinese Lotus Shoes

April 30, 2025 - September 21, 2025

This exhibition presents an extraordinary range of lotus shoes from the Qing dynasty, highlighting the regional diversity and stylistic variations that existed across China. Alongside the footwear itself, visitors will encounter a rich selection of related materials—photographs, illustrations, sculptural works, shoe samples, paintings, and jewelry—that illuminate the cultural, social, and aesthetic dimensions of footbinding.

While showcasing the artistry and craftsmanship of lotus shoes, this exhibition also confronts the troubling history of footbinding and the societal shifts that accompanied China’s transition into the modern era. Through historical documentation and visual narratives, visitors will learn how shoes were made; how family dynamics shaped the practice; how working-class women experienced footbinding; and how Western missionaries influenced public discourse and led campaigns to abolish the custom.

The exhibition traces the many roles of women with bound feet—walking tightropes as performers, laboring in factories and fields, serving as wives, daughters, daughters in law. Ultimately, this exhibition extends far beyond the shoes themselves, capturing a vivid moment in history when tradition and societal transformation collided.

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Foot binding

For more than a thousand years, successive generations of Chinese women endured the painful and exacting process of footbinding. Beginning in early childhood, girls' feet were tightly wrapped with cotton bandages—often by their mothers—to compress and halt natural growth. The resulting form, tiny and arched to a narrow point, was believed to resemble a closed lotus blossom. These “lotus feet” became a revered aesthetic ideal and a powerful symbol of femininity, delicacy, and desirability.

One of the most coveted outcomes of this practice was the “golden lotus”—an adult woman’s foot bound to just three inches or less. Considered the pinnacle of beauty, the golden lotus signified not only aesthetic perfection but also social prestige and refinement.

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This exhibition is presented with artifacts from Chicago-based collector Paul Prentice and is curated by Jeffrey Moy.

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