【Text/Observer Network Columnist Paul】
In recent years, news about the "aesthetic differences" between China and the West and the controversy over insulting China have frequently stood on the hot search. Dolce & Gabbana's absurd painting style of "squinting and seeking education" is still in front of you, and recently, the controversy caused by "Lion Boy" and the three squirrel incidents has also arisen because of "squinting".
In the relevant controversy, some people mix the words slender eyes, single eyelids, squinting eyes, oriental charm, and insults, and argue with each other and even attack each other, and various situations are quite "random flowers gradually want to charm the eyes".
What is "Oriental Charm"? "Oriental charm" unchanged?
The aesthetic differences between China and foreign countries are not new for a long time. But even so, we still have to ask, is it true that Westerners' understanding of beautiful women is different from Chinese? Of course not, and look at China's beauty movie stars, some of them can eat in Hollywood blockbusters. In turn, Western beauty movie stars also have a lot of fans in China. It can be seen that for female aesthetics, at least today, there are many common points between China and the West.
So the question is, why can't these brand advertisements invite beautiful women from China and abroad? In this regard, many foreigners answer that these beautiful women are beautiful, but they do not have "oriental charm".
What is the so-called "oriental charm"? This charm does not emphasize beauty and ugliness, but attaches importance to the "particularity" of oriental peoples, or more precisely, the unique characteristics of Chinese. In terms of appearance, it is prominently presented in squinting eyes, high cheekbones, and thick lips. In addition to physical characteristics, there are also specific situational expressions. For example, the gorgeous decorations, calm posture, and cold expressions in "The Last Emperor"...
Stills from The Last Emperor
Is this the "beauty" of Chinese women? Is this the oriental charm, or is it under the guise of oriental charm, using the hierarchy of civilization and the theory of historical stagnation to describe the East? Look at history, it goes without saying.
The pursuit of beauty runs through Chinese culture. The opening work of the "Book of Poetry", "Guan Ju", portrays the beautiful "Lady of The Lady". In the following chapters, the beauties of the Central Plains countries have appeared, the bride in "Peach Dream" is "scorching its glory", and Zhuang Jiang in "Shuo Ren" is "smiling and smiling, and the beautiful eyes are looking forward to it". These women vividly present the main standards of Zhou people's aesthetics more than two thousand years ago.
Since the Qin Dynasty, China has entered the era of great unification, and the differences between regions have been significantly reduced, but the aesthetic orientation has not been fixed since then.
Before the Tang Dynasty, the upper echelons of society basically regarded slenderness as beauty, from the former Qin's "King Chu has a thin waist, and there are many starvations in the palace", to Zhao Feiyan, who danced lightly in the palm of the Han Dynasty, and then to Zhang Jingwan, who "held the moon and floated a foot of smoke" in the Southern Dynasty, and the beautiful image in the literary works, art paintings, and character figurines in this period all had the characteristics of slender and slender. This was still the case until the early years of the Tang Dynasty.
However, after the Taizong Dynasty, the aesthetic of the posture began to change. The paintings of the Sheng Tang Dynasty also take the abundance of body as the prominent feature of beautiful women, and do not skimp on showing the plump posture. For example, the noble lady in Zhou Fang's "Lady of the Hairpin Flower" wears tulle and her skin is slightly exposed, showing a delicate and feminine posture.
"Lady of the Hairpin Flower" (infographic)
Since the middle of the Tang Dynasty, the fat and thin aesthetic has been transformed again, and the beauty in dumu's "Three Songs of Yangzhou" in the late Tang Dynasty has been "long sleeves around the waist, and Wang Pei is full of miscellaneous wisps", and the thin and weak beauties of the Six Dynasties have returned again. Entering the Song Dynasty, the beautiful women admired by the upper class were not only thin, but also had morbid beauty.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, there was a clearer description of the delicate image of female aesthetics, in addition to being thin, there were also melon face, cherry mouth, clothes to be covered tightly, and walking had to bend over and bow back. This image is not only very different from the grand and unrestrained beauty of the Tang Dynasty, but also has a great change compared to the image of the lady in the two Song Dynasties. And this image also once affected the Western perception of Chinese women. We'll expand on this later.
In short, ancient China's understanding of beauty was not consistent, but in general, there were retrospectives, there were also changes, multi-dimensional expressions, and there was also a consensus that tended to be unified. Can the template of "Oriental Charm" in the eyes of Westerners summarize this aesthetic system in ancient China? If you think about it, you will understand.
Abandonment of tradition
The ancient Chinese judged beautiful women and also paid attention to content other than appearance. It can be said that beauty and unbeautifulness are not only aesthetic issues, but also related to the concept of value.
Or a return to the early classics of Chinese civilization: the women praised in the Book of Poetry are often related to agricultural labor, especially in the mulberry forest closely related to "female weavers", and it is especially easy to brew love. The two heroines of the "Lefu Shuangbi" of the Southern and Northern Dynasties are also expert weavers.
Why do beautiful women have to work? One explanation is that this is directly related to the so-called "Virtue Andyon Gong". The Book of Rites says: Women's morality, women's speech, women's appearance, women's skills, a woman who can get praise, in any case, can not be idle, disease-free moaning person. Therefore, all the acclaimed beauties are not only beautiful in appearance, but also in having all four.
This meaning of beauty also permeates the paintings of this period. For example, the famous "Female History Proverbs" depicts characters that are not only beautiful in appearance, but more importantly, virtuous. In a sense, what the painter paints is not the facial features of women, but the elegant temperament, as well as the qualities of virtuousness, wisdom, and rationality revealed.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, people's connotation requirements for women's aesthetics changed again. The female red craft is no longer important, but the skill of piano, chess, calligraphy and painting is particularly prominent. In Jia Province, the personal maids of the four ladies are called Baoqin, Siqi, Shushu, and Jinhua. Obviously, the requirements of the Miao Family for women have turned more to piano, chess, calligraphy and painting, and those with these abilities are the ideal women who were respected by the upper class at that time.
Stills from "Dream of the Red Chamber"
Although the number of high-class scholars is small, they can often play a leading role in the trend, and the folk aesthetic atmosphere is deeply influenced by the morale. Whether it is the paintings of the literati of the Qing Dynasty or the illustrations of the folk, the beautiful women in them are often the morbid beauties of Lin Daiyu. Even in the most rustic wooden new year paintings, female characters must meet the requirements of the "Female Commandment" - slender, and "no toes, no teeth for laughter".
Therefore, there is no shortage of factors in the traditional aesthetic history of women that need to be discarded, and in fact, today's Chinese are undergoing such dynamic abandonment: such as the delicate cuteness born out of daily life, the rational elegance cultivated by civilization, etc., and even today it is also highly praised by people for their femininity. But since the 20th century, Chinese new aesthetic concepts have long transcended the vision of the ancients.
Whether it is virtue and ronggong, or the foot-binding lotus that deeply oppresses women, many aesthetic consciousnesses that contain the requirements of male discourse have gradually been swept into the pile of historical paper.
"Squinting" three hundred years ago?
Since we have already talked about the paintings and beauties of the Qing Dynasty, we may wish to take the Qing Dynasty as an example to talk about the female aesthetics of the Qing people, what kind of standard it is.
Compared with the Sheng Tang aesthetic represented by Yang Yuhuan, who emphasized "the face is like a hibiscus chest like jade", the Qing Dynasty preferred the weak women who were clear and sad and secretly injured. In the paintings of the Qing Dynasty that have been handed down from generation to generation, whether it is court paintings or folk paintings, even if they are painted by female generals such as Mulan and Liang Hongyu, they also have the characteristics of neck trimming, shoulder cutting, fine eyes, and cherry lips. As for beauty in the general sense, it is even more in line with the etiquette of "leaning on the wind and being weak".
As a result, some people equate "fine eyes" with "squinting eyes" and question "there is a historical basis for Westerners to behave Chinese in this way", "Are small eyes and single eyelids the original sin?" "Slender eyes don't deserve to be Chinese?" Go check out the ancient paintings! ”...... Netizens have refuted such a far-fetched attachment to such a one-sided and ignoring the context of art expression. We won't say more.
Netizens commented on the three squirrels suspected of insulting China
Previously, the author wrote about an overseas magazine using a Qing Dynasty official uniform embroidered with bats to innuendo the new crown epidemic, in fact, the reason is also the same. Bats and official uniforms are not a problem in the normal state, but in a specific situation, the yin and yang are weird, and the problem is big. On the other hand, because this picture is insulting to China, is it that we will not be able to show bats and official uniform elements in the future? The answer is clearly no.
Cover image of the May issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases
Rather than saying that the Qing people shaped the "squinting eyes" of three hundred years ago, it is better to say that they shaped the "net red face" of three hundred years ago.
For beautiful women, the Qing Dynasty people have a very in-depth study, representative of which is the "Beauty Spectrum" of Xu Zhen, a scholar during the Kangxi Dynasty, which explains the standards of beautiful women very clearly. First of all, in terms of age, from the age of thirteen or fourteen, to twenty-three or four. If after this period of time, even if it is a beauty, it is "like a flower blooming, not a mess, and zero thanks follow."
The second is the shape, in this regard, the Qing Dynasty people pay more attention to it, only in the "Beauty Spectrum", there are a long list of descriptions of mantis heads, apricot lips, rhinoceros teeth, crisp milk, distant mountain eyebrows, autumn waves, hibiscus faces, etc., which can be described as from head to toe, meticulous. Li Yu, a scholar of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, was well versed in this way, for example, in the case of the eye, he said: "Those who are thin and elderly, will be soft in disposition, those who are thick and large, and those who have strong intentions will be fierce." In terms of stature, women's posture should be "narrow and not wide", and the waist should be "thin and not thick".
Under the influence of this aesthetic interest, qing dynasty female paintings showed some common characteristics, such as "beautiful people should have slender eyes" and "painters should cut their shoulders". In the illustrations of the Dream of the Red Chamber in various engravings of the Qing Dynasty, although the costumes of Miss Ya Gui are different, the face shape and body shape are almost inseparable from each other.
Stills from "The Strange Book of Heaven"
This stylized aesthetic did influence Western painting. During the Qianlong period, the court painter Lang Shining carefully painted human figures for the Qianlong Emperor and the twelve concubines, that is, the famous "Heart Writing Zhiping Map", looking closely at the paintings, although the five features of the concubines had their own characteristics, the face shape, eyebrows, and eyes were almost exactly the same. If you take a cursory look at this painting, it is easy to have a feeling of "net red face". In this regard, one explanation is that the preferences of the Qianlong Emperor and the dress of the harem concubines were quite similar to the mainstream aesthetics of the time, so it seemed to be somewhat "twelve-person side".
The "Twelve Beauties" of the Leaning Bed, pictured from the Palace Museum.
Some people blame the Qing Dynasty as a collection of traditional Chinese female aesthetics, while others blame some pathological plots on the Qing Dynasty. Both of these statements actually misinterpret the Qing Dynasty. Whether it is a collection of achievements, this needs to be discussed, after all, the aesthetic is constantly changing, there is precipitation, there is updating. From today's point of view, although there are some bad habits in the aesthetic customs of the Qing Dynasty, and even constitute the "oriental charm" in the eyes of some Westerners, it is obvious that this is not an excuse to justify the insulting Chinese symbols.
After the Chen Man incident, the BBC report focused on the fact that "photographers need to apologize for small eyes".
In the face of the general doubts about the image of "squinting eyes" in Chinese Internet public opinion, there are still merchants and advertising producers who "do not hit the south wall and do not turn back", and this time "against the wind" is Mercedes-Benz.
Finally, A warm reminder to some people who pay attention to "oriental charm", instead of always using "squinting eyes" and "collapsing nose" to create a sense of moral superiority of "multiple aesthetics", or using "squinting warning" to create momentum and create public opinion tears, it is really better to spend a little thought, find a few more ancient paintings with high auction prices, and carefully translate and translate what is "beauty" and what is "culture".
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