Dragon Women: Early Chinese Photography, an appointment-only exhibition at the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection, exploring exquisite portraits, many hand-tinted, of Chinese women in the turning of the century beyond the stereotype of ‘Dragon Lady’, characterized Asian women as overly ambitious and calculated. The exhibition included photographs of as powerful women as the Empress, to as freedom as grass root workers living in boats.
We can see social class makes a huge difference in one’s autonomy in photographs. The royal and women from rich families present themselves with luxurious objects that symbolize power and wealth, using this new invention as a replacement medium for ancestor paintings. In contrast, the lower class women got paid to photograph as ‘exotic’ subjects for photo prints selling overseas, feeding the Asian craze in Europe and America.
The exhibition touches on the idea of how beauty standard controls women’s lives. One section dedicated to photographs of foot-binding women, a social norm in past China where women’s feet were broken and bound until became tiny as lotus, making them barely able to walk but believed to be ‘increase production in household lady-like activities like sewing and stitching’. Hand-embroidered tiny shoes for grow-woman that look just like baby shoes are also exhibited, letting us see in real person how extreme it was.
Women photographers in China also get a section. Shout out to photographs by one of the first women photographers in China, Mae Linda Talbot, documenting women and children likely in school. Her ambition to take a heavy camera outside the studio space and her eyes for a moment is admirable, which made her photograph different from other women portraits by her male peers in the exhibition in how spontaneous and lively it looked.
While Dragon Women: Early Chinese Photography shows us how varied lives of Chinese women in the past can be, by their class, economic status, and ethnicity, they all fall into the same pressure, prejudice, and minimal life choices in that patriarchy society. Lingering us with questions; if that stereotype of Dragon Lady just the most rational way some of these women elevate themselves in the women-suppressed society? is it better there now? or the suppression just altered to another contemporary form?
