When we encounter beauty, there is often an instinctive desire to preserve it for as long as possible. Yet beauty is fleeting, and photography offers a means of choosing what to hold on to. Beyond its function as a tool for recording or commemorating social occasions, the camera encourages people to look more closely at the world around them in search of beauty. Shaped by differences in personal background, living environment, education and ways of thinking, each individual inevitably develops a distinct perception of what beauty means. It is this diversity of perception that first sparked my curiosity.

I invited ten friends—five Chinese and five Italian—to take part in the project, asking each of them a simple question: What is beauty to you? Using my Polaroid camera, they were invited to photograph five things they considered beautiful. I then made a portrait of each participant. Together, these ten portraits and fifty images form The Beauty in Your Eyes.

Through this process of enquiry and exchange, I observed both clear differences and subtle common ground between Eastern and Western cultural perspectives. The Italian participants tended to identify beauty in more specific and tangible subjects, such as people, hands or interior spaces. In contrast, the Chinese participants often expressed beauty in more abstract terms, referring to colour, the passage of time or the reflection of light—qualities closely connected to emotion and atmosphere. I chose Polaroid as the medium for this work because of its irreversibility: each image is created in a single moment and cannot be altered. What you see is what you get. This immediacy reinforces the instantaneous nature of photography, allowing beauty to be recorded and presented with honesty and precision.