NEWSLETTER
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie will examine the history and legacy of the decorative style as it relates to women past and present
Exhibition Dates: March 24–August 17, 2025
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 963–65
New York, NY (December 12, 2024) — Opening March 24, 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.
“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.”
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.
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 featured on The Met website, as well as on social media using the hashtag #MetMonstrousBeauty.
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Contact:
Margaret-Anne Logan
Stella Kim
Communications@metmuseum.org
Image: 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)