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 growth?
—Anne Anlin Cheng, “The Stranded Beauty of Yeesookyung,” in Monstrous Magnificence: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (2025)
The unique, objectified Asian girl is likely one of the oldest, most proliferate, and least examined (in)human figures to emerge out of centuries of European cultural creativeness in regards to 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 fees of cultural appropriation and racist projection, each the trope of the unique Asian girl and chinoiserie proceed to thrive in up to date life and tradition. As not too long ago as 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork mounted its personal luxurious, Orientalist sensorium within the enormously common exhibition China: Via the Trying Glass, which explicitly celebrated the fantasy of China as “a land of free-floating symbols.” Sure, chinoiserie may be very a lot alive.
Set up view of China: Via the Trying 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 opportunity of collaborating on an exhibition that revisits European chinoiserie, I used to be cautious. Is that this a type of invites to behave as the educational “beard” for one more exploitative present within the guise of “revision”? And even when the curator had a genuinely vital 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 arms. Alongside Lesley Ma and Eleanor Hyun, she is considered 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 up to date and historic artistic endeavors. She can be most not too long ago creator of Melancholy Wedgwood (2014), a sensible and experimental biography of Josiah Wedgwood that traces the postcolonial and transglobal afterlives of porcelain.
It subsequently 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 type, racialized femininity, world commodity, magnificence, violence, personal needs, and nationwide ambitions. Underpinning the exhibition is the implicit query: How does one thing as superficial as type grow to be 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 up to date Asian-American girls artists talking to 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 in regards to the topic. Even the “classical” objects chosen for the exhibition that must 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 (metallic), on view in Monstrous Magnificence (2025) on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (photograph courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork)
Take into account 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 vital sought-after treasures of the time, and a cargo of spices, in all probability much more treasured 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, affords 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 — nevertheless 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 surprising narratives as properly. As a substitute of seeing White European girls’s relationship to porcelain as merely an occasion of feminine self-importance and “fatal excess,” as Daniel Defoe put it in A Tour Via 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 particular person thought to have birthed the European style for chinoiserie, deployed her appreciable “china wear” assortment as a form 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 way of her “porcelain bodies” a maternal lineage for the Home of Orange. Her complicated relationships to her ceramic “progeny” remind us that monstrosity is actually 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 up to date Asian-American artists that reply with their very own unstable presences. Strolling by way of the deep galleries of European Sculpture and Ornamental Arts to be able 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 in truth 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 in addition 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 surprising fabrication, an assemblage of fictitious loquacity and stuttering discards. Her works recommend not solely that artwork and waste, the human and the inhuman, can co-exist, but in addition that these oppositions could also be profoundly, materially, and imaginatively indebted to at least one 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 grow to be directly extra clever and extra resistant, extra damaged but additionally newly shaped.
Lee Bul, “Monster: Black” (1998/2011), material, fiberfill, stainless-steel body, sequins, acrylic paint, dried flower, glass beads, aluminum, crystal, metallic 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 identify), half of a bigger collection, seems grotesque, asymmetrical, blobby, stuffed with flesh-like limbs, tendrils, and uncovered organs which can be explosively congealed, but additionally morphing. Crafted from supplies usually used for girls’s ornaments, together with metallic, 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 present 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 in addition 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 capturing of six Asian-American girls in Atlanta, underscoring the guide labor and precarity that formed these girls’s lives. The “bed” of this therapeutic massage desk is unfinished ceramic, its porous “skin” permitting for filth and moisture over time to stain its floor. The mattress can be punctured with a number of random holes, the sides 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 website of a former Chinese language neighborhood on the California coast that was burned out by a White riot within the Nineteenth century on the top of anti-Asian sentiment. Right here is an artwork that refuses to be hoarded as treasure. This can be a completely different form of shipwreck — an intentional one, however one which additionally invokes the centuries-long entanglement between Western want and Asiatic “goods,” each materials and corporeal, from ceramic to spices to human labor. Chang’s ceramic memorial, although, goals to rework waste into start, as it’s meant, as soon as sunken, to grow to be a substrate for coral progress, to breed new, inhuman life.
Yeesookyung, Korean, “Translated vase_2017 TVBGJW1_Nine Dragons in Wonderland” (2017), ceramic shards, chrome 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 up to date iterations of the “exotic Asian woman” from science fiction to pornography, there was a longue durée of conflating Asiatic femininity with artificiality, pure sensorium, type, 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 principally ineffectual moralism. However authenticity (“we aren’t really like that”) has by no means been an enough 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 way of artifice?
It might be a mistake and a horrible discount to say that Monstrous Magnificence affords a feminist or racial corrective to a present like 2015’s China: Via the Trying 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 listen, historical past’s captured objects have a lot to say. Lately, 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 vital given the willful forgetfulness of our present second. The exhibition China: Via the Trying Glass could have rehearsed for the Twenty first-century viewers the essential 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 want and denigration. In China: Via the Trying Glass, past what their Euro-American makers and customers may need supposed or silenced, silk and porcelain have their very own tales to inform.
Set up view of China: Via the Trying Glass (2015) on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (photograph courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Artwork)
Monstrous Magnificence makes specific these marginal, unheard narratives behind the lives of objects. This exhibition “about” 18th-century chinoiserie takes dangers: By selecting a number of the extra uncanny and disturbing objects, by inserting a residing relationship with up to date 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 depend 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 the use of Yeesookyung’s collated fragments; when she places Chang’s video “Melon (At a Loss)” subsequent to a 18th-century silver rest room service with tea cups provided as a present to a girl after her wedding ceremony evening; 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 grow to be 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 method: How can we method an unlimited 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 in addition to how a fabric life is likely to be talking to us — mutely, insistently?
To seek out magnificence within the cracksis to know transformationwhere there’s nowhere else to go…
That is how we discuss beautyin a damaged world.
