Join Iris Moon, Associate Curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts along with artist Patty Chang, Professor of Art, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, to virtually explore Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue through August 17, 2025.
The exhibition 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.
Video produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and SandenWolff, Inc.
