Enfilade

Opening in March at The Met:

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 25 March — 17 August 2025

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie radically reimagines 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 fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy, Monstrous Beauty adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment.

Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works spanning from 16th-century Europe to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates chinoiserie through a conceptual framework that brings the past into active dialog with the present. In demand during the 1700s as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East, porcelain accumulated strong associations with female taste over its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a resonant metaphor for women, who became the protagonists of new narratives around cultural exchange, consumption, and desire.

The catalogue is distributed by Yale University Press:

Iris Moon, ed., Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (New York: The Metroplitan Museum of Art, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1588397928, $35. With additional contributions by Marlise Brown, Patty Chang, Anne Anlin Cheng, Elizabeth Cleland, Patricia Ferguson, Eleanor Hyun, Cindy Kang, Ronda Kasl, Joan Kee, Pengliang Lu, Lesley Ma, David Porter, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Chi-ming Yang, and Yao-Fen You.