August 6, 2025
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Ruth Leon recommends….. Monstrous Beauty – A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

Ruth Leon recommends….. Monstrous Beauty – A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

Chinoiserie

Join Iris Moon, Associate Curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum, along with artist Patty Chang, Professor of Art, University of Southern California, to explore Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, on view at The Met Museum, now through August 17.

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.

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The post Ruth Leon recommends….. Monstrous Beauty – A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie appeared first on Slippedisc.

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