An Exhibition at the Met Reimagines the Fascinating History of Chinoiserie

“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.

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.

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