There’s an ick about chinoiserie. A palpable unease gurgles beneath the veneer of politesse and delicate refinement on display in “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie,” The Met’s new show featuring the decorative style popularized in the 17th and 18th centuries. And that’s very much by design.
Start with contemporary Korean artist Yeesookyung’s bulbous, imposing vessels in the central atrium of the Robert Lehman Wing, composed of broken porcelain shards Frankenstein-ed together via the kintsugi repair method, with 24K gold sutures highlighting rather than masking imperfections. Peer at the pendulous breasts on a Medici workshop ewer or those on a screeching siren centered on an 18th-century scalloped sweetmeat dish.
Elsewhere, gawp at Patty Chang greedily gobbling a melon standing in for her breast in her seminal 1998 video Melons (At a Loss) and the bloodthirsty mermaids swimming through Jen Liu’s 2023 video The Land at the Bottom of the Sea. Survey an extravagant 18th-century gilt-silver toilet set like those that elite European husbands offered their wives as a morning-after gift following the wedding night or blue-and-white milk pans from Queen Mary II’s 17th-century faux dairy at Hampton Court Palace, where she and her ladies-in-waiting could, in effect, cosplay trad wife.
“Monstrous Beauty” challenges the traditional narrative of chinoiserie as neutral and harmless. Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works, the show reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens, exploring the longstanding European and American fascination with it, how it shaped women’s identities, and the ways contemporary artists are recasting its meanings. The collection also regards its ceramic material as politically charged; as Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast puts it in the audio guide, “Porcelain wasn’t always polite beauty—it could be monstrous too.”
Chinoiserie was not only a style but an ideology. The arrival of blue-and-white porcelain in Europe some 500 years ago (first as ballast on merchant ships from China) ignited an obsession with the exotic. European-made vases, plates, and teacups depicted invented visions of the East that were colorful, intricate, and sometimes grotesque, especially when featuring depictions of Asian women.
Iris Moon, associate curator in The Met’s department of European sculpture and decorative arts, tells Vogue that the idea for the exhibition traces back to the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, when a white gunman fatally shot eight people, including six Asian women, at three massage parlors. An Elle Decor article soon after prompted Moon to consider the link between chinoiserie and the shootings. “Could it be that chinoiserie has some kind of connection to the lure of the exotic and anti-Asian violence, specifically directed toward women?” she recalls thinking.
An encounter in The Met’s storeroom provided another starting point: an astonishing reverse-painted glass mirror from around 1760 showing a woman in a Manchu-style blue dress with an ermine cape smoking a pipe next to a blue-and-white vase. “I was immediately taken aback by how much space this woman took up in a mirror meant to reflect your own image,” Moon says. “You see her first before you see this as a decorative art object.”
It raised the question: “What if chinoiserie isn’t just about things, but about the fantasies projected onto people and how we’re living with that legacy today?” And it forced Moon to ask herself: “What does it mean to think about the history of exoticism—specifically, the style of chinoiserie—as an Asian American woman in a European sculpture and decorative-arts department?”
“Chinoiserie’s never really read from a subjective viewpoint,” she continues. “Asking how this looks for us today, it starts to unravel and you start to see how it relates to a lot of cultural and gender stereotypes still in circulation.”
Moon admits chinoiserie wasn’t—and still isn’t—her favorite style, preferring the neoclassical period’s straight lines and clean aesthetic to the ornate, highly decorative, and colorful. But looking closely at something often dismissed as whimsical and mere ornament—likely because it was associated with the feminine and the domestic realm of women—led her to understand “how this style was so influential and created a language that ended up getting mapped onto people.”
The result was a presentation that revises assumptions about chinoiserie with the aid of key works by contemporary Asian and Asian American women artists that interrogate the immutable past. LA artist Patty Chang created a newly commissioned work that recalls the unseen labor revealed by the Atlanta spa shootings: a full-size massage table made of raw, unglazed porcelain punctured by holes. After the exhibition closes, it will be sunk in the Pacific Ocean as a deposit for growing coral, part of Chang’s ongoing work with oceans and the environment.
Chang says she was compelled to participate after seeing one of the most fascinating objects in the show: a flower pyramid from around 1695 owned by the porcelain-mad Queen Mary II. On each of the nine levels that ascend to a bust of presumably the queen, a small head sits on every corner with a mouth agape for the insertion of a single flower. “My question was: When you’re the queen and putting a flower into the mouth of this head, are they looking at you?” She regards the piece, which stands nearly as tall as the artist, as “perverse and cruel.”
Beholding her own towering Translated Vase works in the center atrium, Seoul-based artist Yeesookyung—who has made odd, magical objects throughout her three-decade career—felt a different connection to the historical pieces. She admitted that this was her first encounter with many of the European ceramics on view but nevertheless felt a deep kinship between them and her work that she compared to reincarnation. “It’s like finding a missing mother,” she says, “like it’s in my blood.”
The contemporary works bring to the surface overlooked parts of porcelain’s history. The term monstrous from the show’s title, for example, was applied by 18th-century critics who derided chinoiserie as unnatural. It finds resonance with Lee Bul’s Monster: Black from 2011, a tentacled sequin sculpture that commands one of the show’s five galleries. When it emerged from its crate, Moon says, she screamed. “The energy coming off of it was unbelievable,” the curator recalls. “By bringing Lee Bul’s monster piece into dialogue with these 18th-century works, you suddenly realize that language was already living in those historical pieces. We just chose not to see it.”
“Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie” is on view through August 17, 2025, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
