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Ting Zheng

Department:
East Asian Languages and Culture
Cohort
2025
Project Title
Through the Chinese Eyes: Vision, Medicine, and Technology in 20th-Century China

Project Description

This project delves into how Chinese beauty standards for eyes have evolved over the past 100 years, examining images of popular Chinese figures and applying digital tools to identify key aesthetic trends. We aim to train an algorithm using a comprehensive corpus of 20th-century Chinese literature, enabling it to analyze and describe images of eyes based on historical and cultural references. This method will allow us to bridge image analysis with cultural context, identifying shifts from preferences for almond-shaped eyes to double eyelids and understanding the socio-cultural impact of such changes. A historical perspective will be integrated, highlighting the origins and development of double eyelid surgery, which began in 1896 with Japanese physician Dr. Kotaro Mikamo and gained further significance during the Korean War as it became associated with Western ideals. The intern's primary role will be to assist in curating and training the algorithm with the literature corpus, ensuring that it can accurately interpret the visual features of eye images within the context of the era. Additional tasks will include supporting the integration of literary data with image-processing results and collaborating on interpreting findings.