Monstrous beauty: a feminist revision of chinoiserie

Abstract

"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." -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Contents

Directors' foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Lenders to the exhibition and contributors -- Note to the reader -- Introduction : the woman in the mirror -- Shipwrecks and sirens : early arrivals of porcelain in Europe -- Plates -- Surrogate bodies : Mary II, succession, and porcelain obsessions -- Plates -- Artificial mothers : figurines and fantasies of the female subject -- Plates -- Afterlives of chinoiserie -- Plates -- Object encounters -- Notes to the essays -- Bibliography -- Checklist -- Index -- Photography credits