Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, exhibition
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
March 25, 2025 — August 17, 2025
The circular show Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie begins and ends with two ceramic vestiges that trace the shifting politics of porcelain. The first is a piece of sea sculpture (Figure 1)—a hybrid form of marine invertebrates, ship fragments, and a porcelain cup recovered from the wreck of the Witte Leeuw (White Lion), a three-masted trade ship owned by the Dutch East India Company that sank in the South Atlantic Ocean in 1613. The second soon-to-be vestige is Patty Chang’s Abyssal: Massage Table (2025) (Figure 2), a full-size porcelain table punctured by holes and glazed only on its underside. Chang’s piece invokes the unseen labor of Asian women spa workers and will be sunk in the Pacific Ocean after the exhibition closes to serve as a deposit for growing coral.
These two works, separated by four centuries, conjure histories of Asian migratory labor and care work that accompany and outlast porcelain’s global journeys. They also offer a reparative retelling in which porcelain objects—often interpreted as surrogate Asian bodies—take on ecological lives beyond the racialized aesthetics encoded in chinoiserie.
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie is a first-of-its-kind exhibition that brings together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works to reimagine European porcelain through a feminist lens. Chinoiserie emerged in the Age of Discovery as ships returned from Asia laden with porcelain, lacquer, and silk that ignited Europe’s obsession with imported beauty and the fantasy of Eastern femininity. By the eighteenth century, this “Chinese taste” fueled a culture of imitation, transforming domestic objects and palace interiors into imperial spectacles. Later popularized by Honoré de Balzac as shorthand for a delusional obsession with “wanton” Eastern luxuries, chinoiserie names not just a style but an ideology that naturalizes the racialized labor behind luxury goods and projects dehumanizing fantasies of the East onto the figure of the Asian woman.
Iris Moon, Associate Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met, first connected chinoiserie to anti-Asian violence when she read Aileen Kwun’s essay “It’s Time to Rethink Chinoiserie” in the wake of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.1 The conceptual framework of the exhibition further draws on literary and critical race scholar Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism (2019), which theorizes the “perihumanity” of Asiatic femininity as an aggregated personhood produced through the fusion of “thingliness” and “personness.”2 Ornamentalism names a condition of coercion and discipline through racial and sexual objectification. It also gestures toward alternative ways of being for those—especially the “yellow woman”—who have come to know themselves through the decorative, reclaiming ornament as a site of feminist possibility.
The exhibition reimagines the archive of chinoiserie through five thematic constellations: “Shipwrecks and Sirens: Early Arrivals of Porcelain in Europe,” “Surrogate Bodies: Mary II and Porcelain Obsessions,” “Spilling Tea: Performing Domesticity,” “Artificial Mothers: Porcelain Figurines and Womanhood,” and “Afterlives of Chinoiserie.” Historical artifacts are interspersed with works by contemporary Asian and Asian American women artists, each marked by a neon-yellow sign that signals dialogue across time and material.
The juxtaposition of an eighteenth-century sweetmeat dish made by the Doccia porcelain manufactory (Figure 3) with Jen Liu’s video The Land at the Bottom of the Sea (2023) stages one such dialogue. Head pulled back and mouth agape, a siren with pendulous breasts adorns the dish. She claws five scallop shells that fan around her body and serve as vessels for sweet delicacies. Her violently wrenched body evokes porcelain’s etymological tie to the sexualized language of conquest: the word porcelain derives from the Italian porcellana, meaning “cowrie shell” but so named because the shell’s furrowed opening was thought to resemble a sow’s vulva.3 Circulating as currency in the transatlantic slave trade, cowrie shells link porcelain’s luminous surfaces to the hidden economies of extraction, bondage, and racialized labor that underwrote its global circulation.
Jen Liu’s live-action and 3D animation video is displayed beside the cabinet that holds the Doccia dish. Standing before the contorted body of the siren, viewers hear thrashing water and a monotone female voice alternating between English and Mandarin. The video follows porcelain sirens drifting through a dystopian water world. The work reflects on the failures of labor activism in South China by circulating various conditions of social and financial “liquidation”—the collapse of NGOs, the limits of techno-optimism, and art’s struggle to imagine alternative futures.4 To test the boundaries of political and personal speech, Liu programmed AI bots to complete the prompt “The day I was liquidated, I . . . ” The result is a looping script of absurd, self-canceling phrases. The video also contains a QR code linking to an online archive where viewers can extract thousands of encrypted images that document disappeared Chinese women activists.5 In participating, viewers enter a story forcibly erased, enacting the exhibition’s feminist project of revision, resistance, and collective remembrance.
Porcelains are visceral archives. Their delicate bodies demand gentle handling, dusting, and tending. They are instruments of service and care, collecting the touch of lips, the warmth of hands, and the oily residue of fingertips. As the exhibition shows, this viscerality can also be disturbingly violent. Take, for instance, the monumental eighteenth-century Dutch flower pyramid from the “Greek A” Factory: topped with a lady’s bust, it rises in nine tiers, each corner adorned with small heads, cheeks puffed, and mouths agape. Each opening—or shaft—invites its owner to insert a flower down a porcelain throat.
A similar violence lingers in the 1876 tea set by the American manufacturer Union Porcelain Works (Figure 4). Floral and faunal motifs are joined by the heads of an Asian man with a long queue and a Black man as finials of the teapot and sugar bowl. The design alludes not only to the contents of the wares but also to the racial makeup of the laborers on sugar plantations. Every act of serving involves pressing, lifting, or twisting motions that recall, almost viscerally, the subjugation of racialized Others. What does it mean to have a perpetually open mouth? To turn lips, queues, and torsos into functional artifacts rather than living forms?
Patty Chang offers her answer in Melons (At a Loss) (1998) (Figure 5): to end the inheritance of racialized and sexualized stereotypes, she destroys an object that embodies them. The video performance tells a fictional story about a commemorative saucer she received after her aunt’s death from breast cancer. Dressed in a white bustier, Chang stares directly into the camera as she balances a ceramic plate on her head, slices her left breast to reveal a cantaloupe, eats the fruit with a spoon while continuing her narration. Finally, she lowers the plate, smashing it on the ground, and smiles mischievously at the audience. Chang’s narration draws on the iconography of Saint Lucy, who holds her eyes on a golden plate, and Saint Agatha, who bears her severed breasts on one. Her performance turns the imagery of martyrdom and still life—ripe fruit, porcelain, the delicately posed female body—against itself, shattering the eroticized fantasy of the obedient, sacrificial Asian woman.
South Korean artist Lee Bul, meanwhile, repurposes aesthetisized and expendable porcelain bodies into a cyborg fragment. In Untitled (Cyborg Pelvis) (2000), she challenges the restrained elegance of white porcelain tied to Confucian ideals of purity and frugality. The sculpture’s pale celadon surface and riveted seams evoke both armor and anatomy, fusing the delicate curvature of a human pelvis with the hard edges of a mechanical shell. By leaving the work untitled, Lee resists the techno-Orientalist archetype of the Asian female cyborg—mechanical, emotionless, and defined by Western anxieties about East Asia’s technological rise. If, as Anne Anlin Cheng argues in Ornamentalism, the body of the “yellow woman” has always been prosthetic, then Lee’s porcelain pelvis—both sculptural and amorphous—reclaims those materials of objectification, transforming fragility into a language of agency and survival.
Staged in the atrium outside the circular exhibition hall, Yeesookyung’s luminous garden of Translated Vases (2024) (Figure 6) offers a landscape of abandonment. The artist gathers ceramic shards discarded by Korean ceramic masters, who, following tradition, destroy their own imperfect works to preserve the rarity of true masterpieces. She assembles the fragments like a puzzle, fills the gaps with epoxy, and seals the seams with gold leaf, adapting the Japanese kintsugi technique to create bulbous, biomorphic sculptures. Translated Vases echoes the voluntary and involuntary fractures that have marked chinoiserie’s centuries-long life cycle from production, circulation, use, to collection and creative reappropriation. At the same time, the ever-generating sculpture embodies illegibility born of multifarious relations. Each vein of golden calligraphy inscribes a fleeting poem that seeps into the porcelain flesh after the first stroke–fleshes joined precisely through the loss that first tore them apart. An expression of grief, love, anger, and forgetting, the installation calls to mind the transpacific histories and ongoing realities of anti-Asian violence that continue to haunt many of us who think with, write about, and inhabit the ornamental.
Monstrous Beauty wasn’t The Met’s first exhibition on chinoiserie. Its much-critiqued 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass juxtaposed Western haute couture with decontextualized Chinese and Japanese artifacts, turning “Asia” into a dazzling spectacle of exoticism.Many critics contend that China: Through the Looking Glass turned Chinese culture into a dazzling aesthetic fantasy, privileging surface spectacle and Western designer imagination over historical understanding, and in doing so, reproduced rather than challenged orientalist tropes. 6 A decade later, Monstrous Beauty offers more than a feminist and postcolonial corrective to the 2015 exhibition. It advances a practice of relational grievance—a mode that exposes the buried histories of Asian labor sustaining global beauty and fashion, that weaves feminist solidarities across the uneven geographies of racialized desire, and that mourns through intimacies transforming loss into enduring ground for connection.
At the same time, I wonder whether the curatorial practice ultimately tempers the exhibition’s revisionist promise. The only extensively constructed subjecthood in the exhibit belongs to Mary II, Queen of England, who reproduced her absolutist power through porcelain and lacquers that now orbit her portraits in the exhibition hall. What does it mean to uncritically fold white womanhood—a figure long complicit in imperial and enslaving power—into the feminist politics of chinoiserie? The question underscores the need for an intersectional feminism that confronts how race and empire shape the very aesthetics it seeks to reclaim.
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Endnotes
- Lisa Wong Macabasco, “In a New Exhibition at The Met, Chinoiserie Gets a Feminist Framing,” Vogue, March 31, 2025. https://www.vogue.com/article/monstrous-beauty-a-feminist-revision-of-chinoiserie-met-museum; Aileen Kwun, “Opinion: It’s Time to Rethink Chinoiserie,” Elle Decor, May 27, 2021, https://www.elledecor.com/life-culture/a36548998/time-to-rethink-chinoiserie/.
- Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), 18.
- Porcellana literally translates to “little pig” or “young sow.” The term’s double reference—to both the animal and the cowrie shell—underscores the gendered and corporeal metaphors embedded in the material’s very name.
- “The Land at the Bottom of the Sea,” Backslash, 2022. https://backslash.org/art/jen-liu-the-land-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea.
- “Interview: Jen Liu by Xiaowei Wang,” BOMB, March 4, 2024. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/03/04/jen-liu-by-xiaowei-wang/.
- See, for instance, Robert Lee, “China: Through the Looking Glass — An Open Letter,” Asian America Arts Centre, July 20, 2015. https://artspiral.blogspot.com/2015/07/china-through-looking-glass-open-letter_20.html. Anne Anlin Cheng’s theorization of ornamentalism likewise emerges from her critique of the exhibition’s fascination with racialized femininity.
Yunning Zhang