Exhibition to Reimagine the History of Chinoiserie

Through a Feminist Lens

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Ewer (Brocca) (detail), Medici Porcelain Manufactory, ca. 1575–80. Soft-paste porcelain.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.2046)

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

to examine the history and legacy of the decorative style as it relates to women past and present

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Opening March 25, 2025, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the major exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie will radically reimagine the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s pervasive fantasies of both the East and the exotic along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition interrogates the ways in which this mutable, fragile material that shaped European women’s identities in the past also led to the construction of abiding racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy removed from the present, Monstrous Beauty casts a critical glance at inherited attitudes toward the style, exploring how negative stereotypes can be reclaimed as terms of female empowerment.

The exhibition is made possible by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation and Mellon Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Kohler Co., the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Karen and Samuel Choi, The International Council of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Edward John & Patricia Rosenwald Foundation, and Mimi O. Kim.
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“Monstrous Beauty examines the multifaceted legacy of chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “By illuminating the beauty of the object and the power of this art form to reflect, distort, and dictate the ways in which women’s identities have been shaped and perceived across time, this thought-provoking exhibition invites viewers to engage with the past in new ways.”

Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met, said, “Monstrous Beauty is both a story of enchantment and a necessary unraveling of harmful myths from the past—myths about the exotic—that have a hold over the present. It is time to retell the history of chinoiserie.”

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Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works, from 16th-century European works to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates how chinoiserie ornament actively constructed cross-cultural ideas of female desire and agency. Much sought after as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East in the 1700s, porcelain accumulated a variety of associations over the course of its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a charged metaphor for women.

Contemporary works by Asian and Asian American women artists counteract chinoiserie’s stereotypes of exoticism by reclaiming the monstrous as a source of artistic possibility. The exhibition’s central atrium will draw viewers in with an installation of Yeesookyung’s porcelain vessels, which feature broken shards mended and turned into dazzling monsters using the kintsugi repair method. Viewers themselves form an active part of the exhibition, joining the conversation between works from the past and pieces by contemporary artists, including a new commissioned work by Patty Chang. Made possible with the support of the Kohler Company, Abyssal is a full-size massage table made of raw, unglazed porcelain punctured by holes. After the exhibition closes, the table will be sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of a sturdy horizontal support for a passive body, Chang’s massage table is reimagined as an uncanny object with orifices. Chang writes, “The holes put the body in doubt.” Raising questions about who or what we choose to see, the work recalls the unseen labor of Asian women spa workers, such as the six women killed during the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. Abyssal is also about the possibility of afterlives, regeneration, and transformation. Underwater, the table will serve as a deposit for growing coral.

Exhibition Overview
Through a lens of curiosity and critique, porcelain reemerges here as a politically charged material that changed women’s lives. Five thematic sections introduce a mix of unexpected protagonists into the story of porcelain: queens, mothers, monsters, starlets, shoppers, and cyborgs. The style’s inventive language gave voice to novel tastes and identities, but also created lasting stereotypes that are difficult to break. The works of contemporary Asian and Asian American women artists are strategically positioned throughout the five thematic sections to rupture the illusion of a seamless continuity between past and present.

The exhibition begins with porcelain’s arrival in Europe via maritime trade. Porcelain appeared as strange and marvelous, when blue-and-white plates from Asia began arriving by sea in the 16th century. Merchants used porcelain from China as ballast, its weight offering ships stability in rough seas, before realizing they could sell it to eager consumers. Soon, shiploads of porcelain were being auctioned off in Europe by the late 1600s, even as anxieties around shipwrecks, warfare, and colonial violence surfaced obliquely in monstrous decorative motifs.

The next section explores how Mary II, Queen of England, developed an obsession with Asian ceramics in the late 1600s, giving birth to a taste for chinoiserie that influenced generations of women collectors in Europe. Mary’s main role as queen of England was to birth an heir. Instead, she gave birth to a taste for porcelain, which functioned as a surrogate body, a way to reproduce her presence by filling residences with bright ceramics, textiles, and lacquer panels. This feminine, personal take on chinoiserie contrasted with the French monarchy’s uses of the exotic to assert absolutist power.

Tea became ingrained in European culture, and the following section explores how this exotic beverage was turned into a potent symbol of civility that set Europe apart from the “savage” territories it exploited as well as the women who were in charge of cultivating a world of politeness in the home. Porcelain objects gained strong associations with women at a moment when public debates aired collective anxieties around their growing voices as consumers, tastemakers, and citizens.

Through the porcelain figurines that proliferated in 18th-century Europe, porcelain shaped notions of womanhood in unexpected ways. A shifting cast of goddesses, mothers, monsters, and performers, often clothed in gaudy costumes and adopting exaggerated poses, appeared. A starting point for later stereotypes surrounding the Asian woman, these figurines also put pressure on the fixed European vision of womanhood. These small, toylike objects paired with the period’s dazzling painted export mirrors serve as vehicles for reflecting on women’s self-perceptions—on how they wanted to see themselves versus the images imposed on them.

The exhibition closes with the long afterlives of chinoiserie into the 20th century and beyond. This was a period when modern Asian women directly grappled with the stereotypes created by the legacy of a historical style that conflated Asian femininity with traditional luxury objects and European consumption. The American imagination reshaped the style through film and photography. Like porcelain, these media provided a glossy substrate upon which fantasy images of the Asian woman could be projected and reproduced, and also contested.

Credits and Related Content
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie is curated by Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition and be available for purchase from The Met Store.

The catalogue is made possible by the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund.

Additional support is provided by Salle Yoo and Jeffrey Gray and the Doris Duke Fund for Publications.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new audio guide featuring women who share enriching stories and historical insights into the works. The guide will be narrated by Michelle Zauner, of Grammy-nominated American band Japanese Breakfast, with contributions from scholars, artists, and writers, including Iris Moon, Patty Chang, Jen Liu, Anne Anlin Cheng, and Patricia Ferguson.

The Met will host a variety of exhibition-related educational and public programs, including a Creative Convening on May 17 featuring conversations, presentations, and readings by leading scholars, designers, and writers in celebration of the exhibition and Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. A screening of a film starring Anna May Wong on June 22 will feature a conversation on Wong’s work and legacy. An Artists on Artworks program on August 8 will invite writers to respond to works on view with readings of texts that connect to exhibition content. Met Expert Talks engaging exhibition curators and designers will be offered on Tuesday, May 13, and Thursday, May 22, in celebration of AAPI Heritage Month.

Art-making programs will include an Open Studio on Saturday, May 10, that will invite participants to meet artist Heidi Lau, gaining insight into her process of making hand-built ceramic sculptures, and work with Met teaching artists to design their own sculptural relief. Educator programs include an Educator Workshop “Invented Narratives: Chinoiserie, Women, and the Porcelain Imaginary” on Saturday, April 5, which will explore the exhibition and create art with story and perspective in mind. On May 11, Family Programs will present Family Afternoon: Beautiful Monsters from 1 to 4 p.m. for multigenerational audiences to engage in and explore themes related to the exhibition. Families can enjoy learning more about clay making and make their own figurines and embark on a self-guided gallery hunt for families.

The Met’s Community Partnerships and Initiatives team, in collaboration with Mott Street Girls, will offer programs on April 26 in New York City’s Chinatown inspired by the exhibition, including guided walking tours and the opportunity to learn directly from organizations and community members preserving Chinatown’s rich cultural heritage. Tours will visit murals on Doyers Street, family-owned small businesses, and more notable sites of Chinatown’s past and present.

The exhibition is featured on The Met website, as well as on social media using the hashtag #MetMonstrousBeauty.

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