Is that this she or it, what with thoseempty bowls and vases miming hipsand these self-interruptinglines actingas gestures or damaged speech?Are we bearing witnessto natural stays or artificial creations,feral proliferation or arrested improvement?
—Anne Anlin Cheng, “The Stranded Beauty of Yeesookyung,” in Monstrous Magnificence: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (2025)
The unique, objectified Asian girl is without doubt one of the oldest, most proliferate, and least examined (in)human figures to emerge out of centuries of European cultural creativeness concerning the Japanese Different. And chinoiserie, a stylized rendition of Chinese language individuals, tradition, and aesthetics cultivated by early 18th-century European ornamental arts, has lengthy been thought of a minor, even denigrated, aesthetic class, related to female frivolity and artificiality, a decadent superficiality that has come to be symbolized by Asiatic femininity itself. But, regardless of the costs of cultural appropriation and racist projection, each the trope of the unique Asian girl and chinoiserie proceed to thrive in modern life and tradition. As lately as 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork mounted its personal luxurious, Orientalist sensorium within the enormously in style exhibition China: By means of the Wanting Glass, which explicitly celebrated the fantasy of China as “a land of free-floating symbols.” Sure, chinoiserie could be very a lot alive.
Set up view of China: By means of the Wanting Glass (2015) on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (photograph courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Artwork)
So when Iris Moon, affiliate curator of European Sculpture and Ornamental Arts at The Met, contacted me in 2022 about the potential of collaborating on an exhibition that revisits European chinoiserie, I used to be cautious. Is that this a kind of invites to behave as the tutorial “beard” for one more exploitative present within the guise of “revision”? And even when the curator had a genuinely crucial imaginative and prescient in thoughts, would an establishment like The Met enable it?
The minute I met Moon, I knew I used to be in secure palms. Alongside Lesley Ma and Eleanor Hyun, she is certainly one of a small group of Asian-American girls curators in several departments of The Met redefining the museum’s function as caretaker of cultural reminiscence by introducing new approaches to modern and historic artistic endeavors. She can be most lately writer of Melancholy Wedgwood (2014), a wise and experimental biography of Josiah Wedgwood that traces the postcolonial and transglobal afterlives of porcelain.
It due to this fact comes as no shock that Monstrous Magnificence: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie emerged as this expansive, profound, and at instances wry meditation on the interchange between fashion, racialized femininity, international commodity, magnificence, violence, personal needs, and nationwide ambitions. Underpinning the exhibition is the implicit query: How does one thing as superficial as fashion develop into the muse for imagining human worth and embodiment?
Every part about this present is difficult and quirky — from the mesmerizing dialogue it constructs between 18th-century European objects and modern Asian-American girls artists chatting with that historical past and its influence on their lives, to the audio tour that’s much less a information and extra like a dialog amongst associates who simply occur to know one thing concerning the topic. Even the “classical” objects chosen for the exhibition that ought to be reified as dusty exemplars of Euro-American colonial historical past emit a wierd and unruly animacy that reminds us that objects have wayward lives, even when their creators and merchants managed their manufacturing and circulation.
Porcelain and pepper from the Witte Leeuw, operated by the Dutch East India firm, porcelain and iron (steel), on view in Monstrous Magnificence (2025) on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (photograph courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork)
Think about this Seventeenth-century artifact, labeled “Porcelain and Pepper.” It’s a stranded piece of a ship, in all probability iron, recovered in 1976 from the underside of the ocean. It was a part of the shipwreck of the Witte Leeuw, or White Lion, a three-masted ship owned by the Dutch East India Firm that was carrying 400 kilograms (~881 lb) of porcelain, one of the crucial sought-after treasures of the time, and a cargo of spices, in all probability much more valuable then. Items of china and peppercorn have embedded themselves into the fragment over time, whilst marine life and organisms made houses out of this otherworldly remnant. This damaged “branch,” this “monstrous body born from the greed for the artificial white substance that would feed European trade for centuries,” as Moon places it in her catalog essay, provides us a fraction of a rooting family tree and a repository of each imperial historical past and its wreckage.
Certainly, this concurrently natural and synthetic “body” is reminiscence. It instantiates the fragmented residue of voracious imperial urge for food — however it additionally embodies a wierd type of survivance, suggesting that issues can bear meanings promiscuous to their origins as commodity. That is historic sedimentation that carries its personal inner critique.
Different uncanny objects on this exhibition supply a number of and sudden narratives as nicely. As an alternative of seeing White European girls’s relationship to porcelain as merely an occasion of feminine vainness and “fatal excess,” as Daniel Defoe put it in A Tour By means of the Complete Island of Nice Britain (1724), Monstrous Magnificence tells the fascinating story of how Mary II, queen of England, consort of William III, and the individual thought to have birthed the European style for chinoiserie, deployed her appreciable “china wear” assortment as a type of sartorial, psychical prosthetic — as an extension of her sovereignty, and as a symbolic substitute for her infertility. Briefly, a narrative of how Mary II created by her “porcelain bodies” a maternal lineage for the Home of Orange. Her complicated relationships to her ceramic “progeny” remind us that monstrosity is admittedly merely human entanglement with the other-than-human.
These wobbly and unsure objects, which converse from the depths of historical past, are paired with artworks by modern Asian-American artists that reply with their very own unstable presences. Strolling by the deep galleries of European Sculpture and Ornamental Arts with a view to attain the steps down into the decrease Robert Lehman Wing, the place the exhibition is housed, one looks like Persephone descending into Hades’s underworld, if his realm had been actually a female-dominated, glittering panorama of nonliving issues teeming with life. One is greeted first by an arresting ceramic “forest” that includes artist and sculptor Yeesookyung’s ceramic assemblages.
There’s magic right here, and there’s grief. There’s stillness, but additionally vibrancy and proliferation — a wierd life certainly. Someplace between a petrified crypt and an enchanted forest, every of Yeesookyung’s damaged, resuscitated piece of ceramic operates as a self-forming agent that seems to be producing an infinite growth towards an sudden fabrication, an assemblage of fictitious loquacity and stuttering discards. Her works counsel not solely that artwork and waste, the human and the inhuman, can co-exist, but additionally that these oppositions could also be profoundly, materially, and imaginatively indebted to 1 one other. The concept of ladies as vase and vessel is in fact a really outdated one, and the comparability between the Asian girl and the vase is even older. However right here the ornamental vessel has develop into without delay extra clever and extra resistant, extra damaged but additionally newly fashioned.
Lee Bul, “Monster: Black” (1998/2011), material, fiberfill, stainless-steel body, sequins, acrylic paint, dried flower, glass beads, aluminum, crystal, steel chain, on view in Monstrous Magnificence (2025) on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (© Lee Bul; photograph by Jeon Byung-cheol, courtesy BB&M, Seoul)
We flip and are then confronted by Lee Bul’s larger-than-life, shining, encrusted sculpture-cum-creature. “Monster: Black” (1998/2011) (as if the colour itself had been its title), half of a bigger sequence, seems grotesque, asymmetrical, blobby, filled with flesh-like limbs, tendrils, and uncovered organs which are explosively congealed, but additionally morphing. Crafted from supplies typically used for girls’s ornaments, together with steel, silicone, resin, chains, crystal beads, and natural matter, Lee’s monster dramatizes the complicity between the natural and the inorganic, between artwork and waste. It, too, straddles the ambivalence between life and nonlife: Its tendrils are hardened, but additionally suggestive of progress, fullness, animacy, a bursting out of life, a fermentation that can be an arrest.
Then there’s Patty Chang’s heart-stopping brief video “Melons (At a Loss)” (1998), the place feminine inheritance (within the type of a porcelain plate bequeathed by her aunt, positioned precariously on her head), self-mutilation, and self-nourishment/feeding all converge with queasy ease. Is it a coincidence that Asian-American girls artists at this time are meditating on what Moon calls the “porcelain imaginary” and what I’ve elsewhere referred to as “ornamentalism” — that conflation between Asiatic femininity and decoration, that at instances coercive but additionally at instances transformative, transitive property between individuals and issues? I believe not. The query of personhood, corporeal embodiment, and their erasures has been a central disaster and the situation for the making of Asiatic womanhood in Western cultures for hundreds of years.
One other piece by Chang, commissioned by The Met, each concludes and begins the round present. A ceramic sculpture made within the form of a therapeutic massage desk, it explicitly references the 2021 brutal taking pictures of six Asian-American girls in Atlanta, underscoring the handbook labor and precarity that formed these girls’s lives. The “bed” of this therapeutic massage desk is unfinished ceramic, its porous “skin” permitting for dust and moisture over time to stain its floor. The mattress can be punctured with a number of random holes, the perimeters of which have been sanded razor-thin. These frail borders are unexpectedly poignant, for they underscore the fragility of this desk that was meant to assist a physique.
Chang’s intention, after the tip of the exhibition, is to sink the sculpture into the Pacific, on the web site of a former Chinese language group on the California coast that was burned out by a White riot within the Nineteenth century on the peak of anti-Asian sentiment. Right here is an artwork that refuses to be hoarded as treasure. This can be a completely different type of shipwreck — an intentional one, however one which additionally invokes the centuries-long entanglement between Western need and Asiatic “goods,” each materials and corporeal, from ceramic to spices to human labor. Chang’s ceramic memorial, although, goals to remodel waste into start, as it’s meant, as soon as sunken, to develop into a substrate for coral progress, to breed new, inhuman life.
Yeesookyung, Korean, “Translated vase_2017 TVBGJW1_Nine Dragons in Wonderland” (2017), ceramic shards, stainless-steel, aluminum, epoxy, 24K gold leaf, armature, on view in Monstrous Magnificence (2025) on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (© Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia – ASAC; photograph by Andrea Avezzù)
From Marco Polo within the thirteenth century complicated Chinese language girls with the ornaments that they wore to 18th- and Nineteenth-century chinoiserie to modern iterations of the “exotic Asian woman” from science fiction to pornography, there was a longue durée of conflating Asiatic femininity with artificiality, pure sensorium, fashion, and aesthetic thingliness. And to this centuries-long, ongoing means of de-personing and objectification, we’ve little or no to say besides the reiteration of a largely ineffectual moralism. However authenticity (“we aren’t really like that”) has by no means been an satisfactory antidote, as a result of it produces its personal units of stereotypes, operating the hazard of reasserting essentialist claims (“we are really like this”). And what can authenticity imply anyway for a “subject” made (and unmade) by artifice?
It might be a mistake and a horrible discount to say that Monstrous Magnificence provides a feminist or racial corrective to a present like 2015’s China: By means of the Wanting Glass, as a result of as I’ve argued extensively elsewhere, to dismiss the latter as mere Orientalism is to silence but once more these objects consigned to show. Once we concentrate, historical past’s captured objects have a lot to say. In recent times, museums have more and more been accused of being repositories of colonial rapaciousness. However they’re additionally guardians of historic reminiscence and designers of how that previous continues to form our current, which is particularly essential given the willful forgetfulness of our present second. The exhibition China: By means of the Wanting Glass could have rehearsed for the Twenty first-century viewers the fundamental tenets of Nineteenth-century Orientalism, however the objects inside its purview insisted on their very own historicity, their materiality counterintuitively bearing witness to and documenting the fraught, a number of, and mediated histories of transglobal need and denigration. In China: By means of the Wanting Glass, past what their Euro-American makers and customers may need meant or silenced, silk and porcelain have their very own tales to inform.
Set up view of China: By means of the Wanting Glass (2015) on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (photograph courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Artwork)
Monstrous Magnificence makes express these marginal, unheard narratives behind the lives of objects. This exhibition “about” 18th-century chinoiserie takes dangers: By selecting a few of the extra uncanny and disturbing objects, by inserting a residing relationship with modern artwork and social points, by rethinking the vectors and phrases of feminism. It highlights the perilous intimacy between our cherished notions of personhood and objets d’artwork: What does it imply to be a human decoration? Who or what can rely as an individual? What sort of life counts? What’s “woman” if her fleshly embodiment resides in aesthetic abstraction? What does it imply to outlive as an object?
When Moon leads us into the present on chinoiserie by means of Yeesookyung’s collated fragments; when she places Chang’s video “Melon (At a Loss)” subsequent to a 18th-century silver bathroom service with tea cups provided as a present to a lady after her wedding ceremony night time; when she juxtaposes John Bowles’s 18th-century print “The Tea-Table” with Candice Lin’s satirical reply, which hyperlinks the refined desk to the labor behind it; and when she poses the fragment of a Sixteenth-century shipwreck and Chang’s unfinished “Abyssal: Massage Table” — itself additionally destined to develop into stranded wreckage on the backside of the Pacific — as the 2 ending or starting factors within the round galleries, Moon telescopes the previous and the current, revealing their continuities and, in doing so, reconfiguring each. She questions citationality itself and what it means to re-visit. What’s at stake is the query of strategy: How will we strategy an enormous historical past that has produced, and continues to supply, a substantial amount of magnificence, revenue, and violence? What’s our relationship to objectification, its jeopardy and pleasure, and may we be open to not solely our complicity in that seduction but additionally to how a cloth life could be chatting with us — mutely, insistently?
To search out magnificence within the cracksis to know transformationwhere there’s nowhere else to go…
That is how we speak about beautyin a damaged world.
