Installation view of "Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie," on view March 25–August 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Photo: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met
An Exhibition at the Met Reimagines the Fascinating History of Chinoiserie
Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works spanning from 16th-century Europe to today, this show recasts the subject matter through a lens of female empowerment
When 16th-century European traders returned from trips to Asia, they filled their ships’ holds with porcelain as ballast. Little did they know that the blue-and-white wares would spark an aesthetic revolution once off-loaded onto unsuspecting docks.
Finely crafted emissaries of the unfamiliar and fantastically foreign, the ceramics were embraced, domesticated, and eagerly imitated. A stylish bounty of colonialist endeavor, they were celebrated everywhere from the royal courts to affluent high street, sweeping on through the ensuing centuries under the enticingly catchall term chinoiserie.
“Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie,” which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 24, proposes a revolution of a different brushstroke. Organized by Iris Moon, associate curator in the museum’s department of European sculpture and decorative arts, it offers a critique of received ideas that deconstructs traditional scholarship, cross-examines chinoiserie on matters of race, imperialism and the fan dance of the exotic, and centers women as both subjects and objects along a transformational timeline. The show’s 200 works encompass an expansive array from the Met’s collections in interspersed dialogue with contemporary deliberations on chinoiserie’s implications by a select number of Asian and Asian-American women artists.
Doccia Porcelain Manufactory (Italian, 1737–1896) Two sweetmeat dishes, ca. 1750–60. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“As an Asian-American woman, I’m curating through a particular lens” Moon says. “I’m looking beyond existing systems of classification and connoisseurship to questions of content, at how to draw meaning from historical objects.” The frequent appearance of mermaids on chinoiserie produced in China for the European market, for instance, and in such centers as Meissen and Delft, reveals them as siren-like, mythic amalgamations relaying messages about racial mixing, and the seductive nature of alien worlds. Stereotypes were on parade in depictions of prettily passive Chinese femininity and African blackamoors. In the luminosity of chinoiserie’s countless reverse-painted mirrors and the glow of its porcelain, allegories of vanity and self-reflection competed for validation.
Mary II was only fifteen when she married the future William II in 1677, but her outsized passion for chinoiserie heralded the William and Mary style. Because she remained childless, Moon argues, she filled palace after palace and entire rooms with chinoiserie in all its forms, from vases to wallpaper, amassed to symbolize fecundity. It was Portugal’s Catherine of Braganza, bride of Charles II, who introduced the English to tea-drinking. With chinoiserie as its primary vehicle—and many pieces the handiwork of unknown women artists—the domestic ritual was identified with female daintiness and politesse while empowering women as a conspicuous class of consumers at the same time. Available to more daring customers were tea services with coyly disguised pornographic embellishments. As Moon also points out, the word porcelain itself derives from sexually loaded Venetian street slang.
Installation view of "Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie," on view March 25–August 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met
As 19th-century American xenophobia hardened into anti-immigration measures, chinoiserie lent a hand with the dragon lady motif. Hollywood would follow suit by relegating an actress like Anna May Wong to playing such characters, a kind of celluloid chinoiserie. In the show’s main atrium, Moon commissioned Patty Chang to create Abyssal, a massage table crafted in raw, unglazed porcelain perforated by holes, which alludes to the six Asian masseuses killed in the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.
“Monstrous Beauty’s” juxtaposition of past and present, of history’s treasures and the commentaries elicited from artists at work today, Moon says, is intended as “an act of revision, a perspectival shift.” A summons to a fresh curiosity, it cracks open myths to release realities, and, a voyage steered by exquisitely unpacked objects, reaches a clarity of greater understanding.
See more images below:
Attributed to the workshop of John Vanderbank (Flemish, 1683–1717) The Toilette of the Princess from a set of Tapestries "After the Indian Manner." Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Yeesookyung, Korean, born 1963 Translated vase_2017 TVBGJW1_Nine Dragons in Wonderland, 2017. Photo: © Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia – ASAC / photographer: Andrea Avezzù
Travis Banton (American, 1894-1958) Evening dress, 1934. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Installation view of "Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie," on view March 25–August 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met
Woman with a pipe, ca. 1760–80. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cup and saucer, e. 18th century. Photo: Peter Zeray. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cover: Installation view of "Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie," on view March 25–August 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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