The aesthetic heritage of "yellowface".
The primary cultural vehicle of modern American society is cinema, and the New York film industry and its successor, Hollywood, spared no effort in the 20th century to use white actors deliberately dressed as "yellow-faced" actors to show audiences the Asian culture they examined. The so-called "yellow face" is that white people of caucasian race deliberately dye their skin tone yellow, and adjust their face shape and the corners of their eyes through makeup, showing the Asian image in their comics. The term Yellowface comes from another object of their favorite role and entertainment, the "blackface" of Africans.
"YellowFace" was shaped by the British director D.W. Griffiths, who in 1910 produced The Chink at Golden Gulch (Chinese of the Gold Rush), a term used by foreigners specifically to denigrate East Asians (mainly Chinese) as a sly, squinting-eyed image, meaning slit, crack. This film can be regarded as laying the foundation for the impression of Asians in the future Western video culture.
The most famous defamation Chinese film character, Fu Manchu, is from the movie "The Mask of Fu Manchu", also played by a white actor with a "yellow face", using squinting squints that now seem very classic, and determining the standard for squinting eyes of Asians in hollywood film and television and fashion.
Notice that Fu Manchu (right) and the heroine are both white people who draw oblique corners of their eyes, making them look thin and oblique
After that, the famous Hollywood Chinese element film was "Dragon Breed" filmed in 1944, which according to today's point of view is a rare witness to "Sino-US friendship". The film depicts a girl from a Chinese village rebelling against the Japanese invaders during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and also features parts of the "Song of the Three People's Principles" and the melody of the "March of the Volunteers", with the heroine being the famous Kathleen Hepburn. Of course, she also had to use a "yellow face".
A comparison of Catherine Hepburn's appearance and the image in the film shows the American obsession with China's squinting eyes
This "yellow face" did not fade until the 1970s, when the American civil rights movement forced reforms of U.S. laws to allow "intimate" contact between actors of different races. Before that, because movies had to have white protagonists who had to be played, the so-called Asian-style movies had to be played by "yellow-faced" white people.
Although the "yellow face" disappeared with the internationalization of Hollywood, the Asian style cultural elements of Hollywood and the Hollywood characteristic Asian decoration and beauty industry that accompanied its development were more prosperous, and all Asians who wanted to enter the international cultural entertainment circle led by the United States needed to accept it.
Therefore, from time to time, we can see that international luxury brands will choose some publicity pictures that they believe to have the so-called "Asian beauty". Even when more than 1/3 of the income of luxury brands today comes from China, they still cannot change this "aesthetic", because this is a "tradition" that has developed with the cultural entertainment media for hundreds of years, deeply embedded in the concept of its fashion leader.
Sudden "fox eye" fashion
The so-called "fox eyes" is an eye shape that began to be popular in The European and American entertainment media in 2019, imitating the upward tilt of the corner of the eye through makeup, plastic surgery or manual lifting of the corner of the eye. After fermenting for a while, this so-called epidemic sparked a heated discussion in the Media in the West, led by CNN, about whether it was a "pop" of racism against Asians.
This so-called "fox eye" is characterized by the narrow and long eye shape formed by lifting the corner of the eye, so it hides the Western mockery of the East Asian "chinky", and this popularity tries to "artistically" this action and shape it into a so-called "free" aesthetic standard. It is similar to the narrow-eyed aesthetics of East Asians that Western fashion judges deliberately emphasize and shape, aiming to strengthen the racial stereotypes of the West with an "international standard" artistic image and further deepen its soft power influence on the cultural radiation of various countries.
This epidemic has only operated in Western public opinion circles and has not been extradited to Chinese networks, perhaps because of the sensitivity of this epidemic. In early 2020, some Asians in the United States and Europe began to organize protests in online public opinion, triggering the participation of the big media in the topic of racism, and then the epidemic began to be diluted, so far the author can only find relevant eye plastic surgery and makeup topics on the internet, but few people have made the action of lifting the corners of the eyes.
It is worth mentioning that the models hired by the three squirrel brands that were on the hot search yesterday also have this kind of lifting the corner of the eye.
The topic of eye-shaped aesthetics will not be repeated by the author. In the past two years, some brands have deliberately asked models to make an image of tilting the corner of their eyes and publicized it by media platforms, with the intention of allowing the Chinese public to see. This approach is not out of thin air, it is closely related to the trends set off by fashion leaders in Europe and the United States.
The eye shape is natural, but there should be no emphasis on just one image in works of art and culture
Some people say that squinting eyes are also a natural eye shape and should not be opposed to this look. But when a feature is widely circulated in the cultural image, it becomes a label, but the label is not portrayed by the public, but is promoted by traffic channels, platforms, circles, that is, people with power, resources and influence, so we need to criticize and be vigilant against this behavior.
The heights of public opinion and discourse power have everyone have the opportunity to go up, and the key lies in where the ass of the person with the right to speak sits. The choice of brand merchants has problems, but the cooperation with merchants is far more than models, but also a large circle of cultural and artistic people, which are diverse and varied. Just as the model catwalk of tsinghua academy of fine arts has triggered a hot discussion. The vast number of young people in our art, culture, and education systems that radiate from them are also being influenced by this aesthetic that comes from the colonization of Western culture.
Education is the foundation, this year's national reform of education, especially the change in the admission standards for art students, is to realize that china's soft power at the elite level in the field of cultural public opinion is extremely weak, can only rely on the awareness of the netizens and the spontaneous action of some self-media to defend the ideological position.
This is inseparable from the ideological consciousness and interest position of the elites in the context of the times, but it is also more necessary to be more vigilant against the negative effects of this radiation from the upper echelons on the younger generation, and for individuals, the power of inheritance is often the greatest.