Fragmented Feminism and the Trouble with Chinoiserie
Lillian Quijano Johnson and Urvi Kumbhat on Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
August 8, 2025
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Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, installation view, The Met, 2025
Over the last two decades or so, revisionism has been a central pillar of art historical inquiry, scholarship, and exhibition-making. This methodology has sought to rectify historical exclusions by giving overlooked or dismissed artists and regions their due. Such projects have been derided as mere identity politics—adjusting statistics but not structures—especially in the last few months as the Trump administration has dismantled Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DEI) initiatives. While superficial representation is, objectively, not enough to upend exclusionary institutional structures, revisionism has contributed to advancing a richer and more inclusive art history.
The Met has consistently and self-reflexively organized exhibitions engaged in these efforts. In 2021, the museum presented Surrealism Beyond Borders, a global account of surrealism that troubles the narrow, European history New York’s museums have made canonical. Last year, it mounted The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, which many took as an attempt to make up for its troubling ethnographic display Harlem on my Mind in 1969. Currently, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie examines anew colonial and Orientalist objects in its collection, a decade after the Costume Institute’s China: Through the Looking Glass. Here, Lillian Quijano Johnson and Urvi Kumbhat look closely at Monstrous Beauty, both arguing for its significance to the history and critique of chinoiserie aesthetics and pointing to where it falls short. Only time will tell whether the Met’s welcome and generative interventions will continue amid the politics of the current moment.
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 25–August 17, 2025.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie announces its distinctively critical posture in its own title, declaring itself “a feminist revision.” The revisionary project often appears as an ethical act and, increasingly, part of a broader institutional impulse to correct the record on inherited cultural narratives. It’s tempting to understand Monstrous Beauty as an intersectional intervention into the Met’s 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, widely derided for its Eurocentrism and uncritical restaging of Orientalist tropes. But Monstrous Beauty does more than mere redress. Rather than clarify chinoiserie as a misunderstood aesthetic, Monstrous Beauty proposes that feminist revision might not mean repair but something purposefully unruly: a reencounter with the ornamental debris, messy colonial intimacies, and gendered fantasies that make chinoiserie so challenging to engage with in the first place.
Traditionally, chinoiserie connotes a European fetishization of East Asian decorative style severed of specificity, which crystallized in the early seventeenth century, shaped by the militarized expansion of colonial trade and the export of Chinese goods through the Dutch and British East India Companies.1 This aesthetic hinged on fantasies of Asian femininity and hardened into a category of wasteful taste, popularized by the novelist Honoré Balzac and used to denigrate its women collectors.2 Monstrous Beauty compiles nearly 200 works that range from traditional sixteenth-century artifacts of chinoiserie to contemporary reinterpretations of the style, tracing a winding circuit of European and US imperial power and its intimacies with Asia, South America, and the West Indies into the present. The assembly of objects is dissonant, sometimes even jarring: from found shipwreck and tea-sets carrying hidden erotica to confrontational short films and an archival gown worn by the first Asia-American Hollywood star, Anna May Wong.
Monstrous Beauty’s revisionary impact depends, most provocatively, on its ability to frame chinoiserie as a reclaimed medium for feminist contestation, mourning, and self-narration, set against its history of rendering Asian femininity an objectified stylistic resource. Curated by Iris Moon, the exhibition is structured around sections that function almost like authorial signatures, retelling the story of porcelain through the perspective of “Shipwrecks and Sirens,” “Surrogate Bodies,” “Spilling Tea” and “Artificial Mothers.” In each, historical objects are placed in uneasy proximity with artworks by contemporary Asian and Asian American women that unravel chinoiserie’s painful legacy. While these interventions recenter the voices chinoiserie once marginalized, they risk remaining largely symbolic—confined to a celebration of authorship, representation, and platforming on the institution’s terms. However, the exhibition largely resists self-appeasement. Moon’s recent book Melancholy Wedgewood (2024) explores the museum’s tight imbrication in eighteenth-century industrial capitalist extraction, the exploitation of women’s labor, and colonial dispossession. Monstrous Beauty reveals imprints of Melancholy Wedgewood’s critical teeth, often subtly implicating the museum itself in the very modes of gendered consumption, fetishization, and colonial display it brings into question.
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, installation view, The Met, 2025
The exhibition begins in the Robert Lehman atrium, where Korean artist Yeesookyung’s Translated Vase (1963, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024) series formalizes chinoiserie’s historical trajectory from appropriative luxury good to its later disposability as it became mass produced, trivialized, and associated with gendered frivolity. Made of discarded ceramic vessels and sutured by gold leaf, the five sculptures perch their grandiosity on scuffed wooden pallets. Their shapes gesture at idealized feminine form, but the heaped and ruptured vases disallow a direct analogy. Departing from the process of Kintsugi, a Japanese tradition of mending damaged ceramics with gold and lacquer, Yeesookyung doesn’t repair what is broken but recomposes the fragments by emphasizing their unsightly fractures. According to Yeesookyung’s artist statement, the ceramic shards are collected from pots deemed unworthy and destroyed by the ceramic Korean masters; this act of destruction is necessary to ensure the “rarity and value of the surviving works.”3 The worth of the surviving masterpieces are maintained through a process of discarding what is considered inferior. Yeesookyung revalorizes these rejected fragments, making visible the proximity between art and refuse. The sculptural assemblages take up the scraps of the Korean ceramic tradition and remake them into sites of marginalized cultural memory, foregrounding a logic of salvage rather than repair.
The rest of the exhibition’s galleries encircle the atrium where the Translated Vase series is on view, beginning with a room titled “Shipwrecks and Sirens: Early Arrivals of Porcelain in Europe.” A sea sculpture recovered from the 1613 shipwreck of the Dutch East India Company’s Witte Leeuw (“White Lion”)—formed over time from metal, Chinese porcelain, animal shells, and beads of peppercorn—alerts viewers to a pre-history of capitalism that took Asia, and particularly China, as its point of departure for an emerging world market. Foreshadowing yellow peril discourses, China looms in the exhibition as a source of endless cheap labor and mass manufacturing for global capital and a threat to Western dominance, managed today through banal utterances such as made in China. The exhibition indicates the origins of this popular insult, exploring early European anxieties about China’s artifice and superficiality as premonitions of contemporary discourses on inferior Chinese reproductions, brand dupes, and tacky commodities. As the exhibition suggests, this menace of duplicity is intertwined with feminine stereotypes, from the treacherous siren to the deceptive “Dragon Lady” stereotype.
Monstrous Beauty subverts the twenty-first-century imaginary of China as capable of inundating us with unreliable counterfeits at any moment. Objects such as a sixteenth-century Medici pitcher made of soft-paste porcelain point to Europe’s obsession with not only collecting porcelain but also “discovering” its “secret.” Looking closely at the pitcher reveals a lumpen surface, betraying both the European drive to master Chinese technique and its failures. The display of European porcelain reproductions provides an alternate genealogy of the figure of the Chinese counterfeit. If racist fearmongering today positions China as an effeminate copy-machine, incapable of originality, then the exhibition reminds us that made in China was once the sincere striving of European decorative ambition.
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, installation view, The Met, 2025
“Shipwrecks” is particularly attuned to chinoiserie’s imperial contradictions, juxtaposing its critique of Europe’s blurred practices of mimicry with an inquiry into gendered fantasies of purity, order, and classification. In Willem Kalf’s Still Life with Fruit, Glassware, and a Wanli Bowl (1659), a floral-patterned Kraak porcelain bowl from the Wanli period sits amid dimpled Seville citrus, gold-leafed Venetian glasses, and a double-knotted Turkish carpet—each object meticulously demarcated by region, material, and value in the spirit of Enlightenment empiricism. Yet beneath its poise, the arrangement appears to teeter. The lemon’s other half is crushed under the bowl. The rug tilts toward a fragile assembly of chinoiserie and glassware, which seem seconds from toppling over.
The wall labels contextualize the still life within the Dutch East India Company’s procurement of “Oriental” luxury objects, reminding viewers that white traders secured passage and authority in Asia through marriages to local women.4 Monstrous Beauty therefore recasts the painting’s taxonomic grammar as a visual attempt to reconcile the disorderly intimacies of global expansion with the colonial impulse to contain the sexual threat of miscegenation. In this exhibition, Kalf’s still life reads less a celebration of imperial domestic order than an anxious effort to keep imagined feminine and racial excess from spilling over.
Where “Shipwrecks” traces chinoiserie’s epistemic aspirations, “Surrogate Bodies: Mary II, Succession, and Porcelain Obsessions” turns to its entanglements with imperial power and reproductive femininity. The section focuses on the controversial Queen Mary II, credited with popularizing the taste for chinoiserie in Europe as a display of Dutch commercial power. The Toilette of the Princess is a wool and silk tapestry likely made by Flemish weaver John Vanderbank after 1690 and represents those found in Mary’s royal interiors. The tapestry centers on a woman who holds one child against her body and grasps the hand of another. This reproductive detail brushes against the exhibition’s recasting of chinoiserie as a substitutive lineage for the Queen, under pressure to produce a royal heir. Reframing Queen Mary’s role from a conduit of consumerism to a visionary art collector, the exhibition asserts that domestic femininity might also be considered a domain of aesthetic practice. But this remedial slant risks severing the aesthetic too cleanly from its material and political consequences. Does Mary’s complicity in the imperial porcelain trade become sidelined in order to center her agential tastemaking? If the exhibition revises Mary’s historical prominence, then Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s sculpture Pretty Sister, Ugly Sister (2014)—installed near Mary’s portrait—diminishes the Queen’s centrality. The sculpture is made of two oval porcelain plaques, one threaded with strands of the artist’s blue-dyed hair, the other spiky and bare. Its minimalism and fraying threads reduce conventions of femininity to their disarticulated parts, denaturalizing them and providing a reprieve to the viewer disoriented by aristocratic decadence.
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, installation view, The Met, 2025
The next section puts more pressure on the impulse to revise domestic motherhood into a source of quiet agency. Titled “Artificial Mothers: Porcelain Figurines and Womanhood,” it includes a collection of porcelain caricatures of Asian women once displayed in eighteenth-century European homes. Looming over these doll-like collectibles, Lee Bul’s lofty sculptural piece Monster: Black (2011) piles together the figurines’ visual elements (floral patterns, shiny material, tacky costumes) onto a grotesque, animated form. Up close, its fleshly limbs reveal a tangle of sleek silver sequins, dried flowers, gaudy golden chains, and glass beads. From farther back, these hyperfeminine details collapse into a shiny, undifferentiated mass.
For Lee Bul—a South Korean conceptual artist whose commissioned works Long Tail Halo decorated the Met’s facade until recently—sculpture has long been a medium to explore the threshold between gendered subjectivity and decorative thingliness. During an interview with Stephanie Rosenthal, she calls feminine embodiment “a battle-field where political and social issues collide.”5 In Monster, that battlefield slumps. The figure’s coiling head droops to one side, its tangle of limbs spread to reveal the stainless-steel frame made to support its limp cotton form. And yet, the show urges us not to read Monster as an uncomplicated defeat. Placed against the collection of delicate porcelain figurines, the sculpture overwhelms its display space, disrupting the fantasy of easy consumption and voiceless ornament chinoiserie collections ordinarily evoke. It doesn’t reclaim femininity—it drags it down, twisting florals, gloss, and exotified ornament into something heavy and unresolved. Viewers might best understand Monster as part of the exhibition’s overarching interest in staging feminist refusal not through spectacle, but through blockage, stuckness, and irresolution.
“Afterlives of Chinoiserie” tracks chinoiserie’s modern dispersions into cultures of nostalgia and an eroticized US imaginary, placing objects which fabricate Asian femininity alongside contemporary feminist responses to this history of dehumanization. Patty Chang’s Abyssal (2025), the exhibition’s only commissioned work, is a porcelain massage table that memorializes the 2021 Atlanta Spa shootings, in which eight people were murdered, six of them Asian women. Their reproductive labor—an informal current underneath so-called proper routes of immigration, morality, and capital—becomes painfully visible in its severe and almost tomb-like form. The table’s top is rough and unglazed, while its underside is glazed cobalt blue and rippled like water, prophesying its oceanic future—Chang plans to submerge the table in the Pacific Ocean to serve as a coral deposit. Moon told us we could touch the table, and our hands traced its contours, approximating the tactility of the massage. But the variously-sized holes across its length—which mirror the opening conventionally meant for the head of a person—defy function and unsettle any intimacy with the work’s materiality. Interestingly, the table was produced by Kohler, a collaboration that appropriates the resources of industrial production for mourning social reproduction’s transnational violence. With its final, oceanic destination in mind, the work jettisons its institutional location in favor of an alternate principle of redistribution in ecological cycles of regeneration. Perforating economies of racialized femininity, Abyssal will eventually become estranged from our gazes altogether.
Fittingly, it is with this irreconcilable grief that the exhibition closes. In the end, Monstrous Beauty does not resolve chinoiserie into a feminist triumph. Instead, its circular forms, contingent shapes, and gaping holes hinder any attempt at closure. At its best, the exhibition insists on the mutability of seemingly frozen aesthetic categories and achieves an expansive multiplicity of relations and influences across porous boundaries of identity, value, and place. In a less generous reading, it risks overwhelming the viewer and diluting the coherence of its feminist politics. But perhaps this restless elasticity and abundance is the point. In staging chinoiserie not as a frozen hoard of imperialist and gendered fantasies but as an ongoing archive of fantasy, failure, and rewriting, Monstrous Beauty asks what it means to open feminism itself to a process of revision. What might feminism look like if we start anew, not with unity or empowerment, but with fragments, piles, mistranslations, and waste? In testing this approach, Monstrous Beauty brushes over the potential contradictions of making an institutional critique from within the institution itself, handing over the last word to its viewers. What it offers is an invitation: to sort through the debris ourselves, and decide what we make of it.
1 Iris Moon, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025), 16.
2 Moon, Monstrous Beauty, 16.
3 Yeesookyung, “Nine Dragons in Wonderland (2017),” accessed May 10, 2025, https://www.yeesookyung.com/translated-vase.
4 Moon, Monstrous Beauty, 48.
5 Eleanor Soo-Ah Hyun,“Porcelain Cyborg/ Cyborg Porcelain,” in Iris Moon, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025), quotes from a 2018 interview titled "A Feeling About Freedom: Lee Bul in Conversation with Stephanie Rosenthal," 215.
Lillian Quijano Johnson is a PhD Student in Princeton University’s English Department. Her research interests include nineteenth-twentieth-century American literature, Marxist aesthetic thought, decolonial theory, and global modernism. Currently, she works at the intersection of Philippine and American studies toward questions about the political theory of hospitality.
Urvi Kumbhat is a writer and a PhD student in English at Princeton working at the intersection of contemporary postcolonial literature and Marxist feminisms. Her writing appears in The Georgia Review, Lit Hub, Protean Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also at work on a novel about a cruise ship and a short story collection set in Calcutta.
All images: Photo by Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met
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