Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Exhibition Overview

Monstrous Beauty 

A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

March 25 – August 17, 2025

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a major exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, which radically reimagine 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 pervasive fantasies of both the East and the exotic along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition interrogates the ways in which this mutable, fragile material that shaped European women’s identities in the past also led to the construction of abiding racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy removed from the present, Monstrous Beauty casts a critical glance at inherited attitudes toward the style, exploring how negative stereotypes can be reclaimed as terms of female empowerment.

“Monstrous Beauty examines the multifaceted legacy of chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “By illuminating the beauty of the object and the power of this art form to reflect, distort, and dictate the ways in which women's identities have been shaped and perceived across time, this thought-provoking exhibition invites viewers to engage with the past in new ways."

Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met, said, “Monstrous Beauty is both a story of enchantment and a necessary unraveling of harmful myths from the past—myths about the exotic—that have a hold over the present. It is time to retell the history of chinoiserie.”

Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works, from 16th-century European works to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates how chinoiserie ornament actively constructed cross-cultural ideas of female desire and agency. Much sought after as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East in the 1700s, porcelain accumulated a variety of associations over the course of its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a charged metaphor for women.

Contemporary works by Asian and Asian American women artists counteract chinoiserie’s stereotypes of exoticism by reclaiming the monstrous as a source of artistic possibility. The exhibition’s central atrium draws viewers in with an installation of Yeesookyung’s porcelain vessels, which feature broken shards mended and turned into dazzling monsters using the kintsugi repair method. Viewers themselves form an active part of the exhibition, joining the conversation between works from the past and pieces by contemporary artists, including a new commissioned work by Patty Chang. Abyssal is a full-size massage table made of raw, unglazed porcelain punctured by holes. After the exhibition closes, the table will be sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of a sturdy horizontal support for a passive body, Patty Chang’s massage table is reimagined as an uncanny object with orifices. Patty Chang writes, “The holes put the body in doubt.” Raising questions about who or what we choose to see, the work recalls the unseen labor of Asian women spa workers, such as the six women killed during the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. Abyssal is also about the possibility of afterlives, regeneration, and transformation. Underwater, the table will serve as a deposit for growing coral.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie: Exhibition Overview

Through a lens of curiosity and critique, porcelain reemerges here as a politically charged material that changed women’s lives. Five thematic sections introduce a mix of unexpected protagonists into the story of porcelain: queens, mothers, monsters, starlets, shoppers, and cyborgs. The style’s inventive language gave voice to novel tastes and identities, but also created lasting stereotypes that are difficult to break. The works of contemporary Asian and Asian American women artists are strategically positioned throughout the five thematic sections to rupture the illusion of a seamless continuity between past and present.

The exhibition begins with porcelain’s arrival in Europe via maritime trade. Porcelain appeared as strange and marvelous, when blue-and-white plates from Asia began arriving by sea in the 16th century. Merchants used porcelain from China as ballast, its weight offering ships stability in rough seas, before realizing they could sell it to eager consumers. Soon, shiploads of porcelain were being auctioned off in Europe by the late 1600s, even as anxieties around shipwrecks, warfare, and colonial violence surfaced obliquely in monstrous decorative motifs.

The next section explores how Mary II, Queen of England, developed an obsession with Asian ceramics in the late 1600s, giving birth to a taste for chinoiserie that influenced generations of women collectors in Europe. Mary’s main role as queen of England was to birth an heir. Instead, she gave birth to a taste for porcelain, which functioned as a surrogate body, a way to reproduce her presence by filling residences with bright ceramics, textiles, and lacquer panels. This feminine, personal take on chinoiserie contrasted with the French monarchy’s uses of the exotic to assert absolutist power.

Tea became ingrained in European culture, and the following section explores how this exotic beverage was turned into a potent symbol of civility that set Europe apart from the “savage” territories it exploited as well as the women who were in charge of cultivating a world of politeness in the home. Porcelain objects gained strong associations with women at a moment when public debates aired collective anxieties around their growing voices as consumers, tastemakers, and citizens.

Through the porcelain figurines that proliferated in 18th-century Europe, porcelain shaped notions of womanhood in unexpected ways. A shifting cast of goddesses, mothers, monsters, and performers, often clothed in gaudy costumes and adopting exaggerated poses, appeared. A starting point for later stereotypes surrounding the Asian woman, these figurines also put pressure on the fixed European vision of womanhood. These small, toylike objects paired with the period’s dazzling painted export mirrors serve as vehicles for reflecting on women’s self-perceptions—on how they wanted to see themselves versus the images imposed on them.

The exhibition closes with the long afterlives of chinoiserie into the 20th century and beyond. This was a period when modern Asian women directly grappled with the stereotypes created by the legacy of a historical style that conflated Asian femininity with traditional luxury objects and European consumption. The American imagination reshaped the style through film and photography. Like porcelain, these media provided a glossy substrate upon which fantasy images of the Asian woman could be projected and reproduced, and also contested.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie is curated by Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition:

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Author: Iris Moon

256 pages, 172 illustrations

Paperback, 7 1/4" x 10 1/2"

ISBN: 9781588397928

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

www.metmuseum.org

Genesis Belanger @ Pace Gallery, London - "For In the Right Conditions we are Indistinguishable" Exhibition

Genesis Belanger

In the Right Conditions we are Indistinguishable

Pace Gallery, London

October 9 - November 9, 2024

GENESIS BELANGER

Self-awareness, 2024 

© Genesis Belanger, courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery  

Photography by Pauline Shapiro.

Pace presents the first solo exhibition of works by GENESIS BELANGER in the UK at its Hanover Square gallery in London. For In the Right Conditions we are Indistinguishable, Genesis Belanger probes the shifting complexities of self-curation, domestic labor, and our relationship with nature through fourteen new sculptural groups. These works, rendered in the artist’s most saturated palette to date, mark an exciting evolution of subject and material in Genenis Belanger’s practice.

Working across porcelain and stoneware, metal, wood, and painting, New York based Genesis Belanger creates tableaux that draw from, and critique, the aesthetics of capitalist production and consumption. Her work is characterized by an idiosyncratic visual language that repurposes everyday objects into often seductive, yet unsettling, surrogates for human emotions and societal anxieties. Informed by her experience as a prop-styling assistant, Genesis Belanger’s installations mimic the semiotic strategies of advertising—using beauty, nostalgia, and humor to evoke psychological responses. Yet, in Genesis Belanger’s hands, these familiar symbols are recontextualized, shifting from tools of persuasion to agents of critical reflection.

For her exhibition at Pace, Genesis Belanger presents a series of installations that transform the gallery space into a labyrinth of altered everyday vignettes. Throughout this staging, motifs repeat and evolve, each configuration offering new perspectives on the themes of the work. Complicating notions of interiority and exteriority, elements of domestic furniture—a vanity table, the contents of a fridge, and a vacuum cleaner—is punctuated by life-size trees bearing porcelain cherries and melons. These eerily anthropomorphic objects suggest narratives about the human condition while also exploring nature's reduction to backdrop. In works like the mosaic 16 Bit Eden (2024), where video game-like pixelation merges with floral motifs, depictions of the natural world are relegated to embellishments, reflecting our desire to commodify and shortcut direct engagement with organic reality.

The absence of the human body is a recurring theme in Genesis Belanger’s work. While never explicitly present, its remnants and suggestions permeate the scenes. In Sentimental Attachment (2024), manicured fingers form the teeth of a green comb, evoking a tactile sensuality that is both intimate and disconcerting. This absence is felt throughout the exhibition, where everyday objects—groceries, candles, and pills—become proxies for the body, reflecting the complexities of identity, desire, and the labor associated with maintaining both.

Throughout the installations, symbols of fecundity and fulfilment call attention to the body as an instrument of consumption. Fruits and cakes, rendered in a state of near-grotesque perfection, straddle the line between the delicious and the disturbing. The oversized cakes of I Had to Try Them All (2024), for instance, with bites taken out of them, suggest excessive indulgence. The playful seduction of tongue-tied cherry stems atop pristine fruit grows increasingly compulsive and absurd with each identical repetition.

The symbolism extends to the motif of pills, whose coloring mirrors those of the cakes. This juxtaposition underscores the duality of consumption—where nourishment and medication, pleasure and necessity, coexist in tension. Pills, as objects, are deeply personal yet ubiquitous, representing both the promises of modern medicine and the burdens of a society increasingly reliant on pharmaceutical solutions. In Genesis Belanger’s work, these pills become symbols of the extreme measures we take to manage and escape the pressures of contemporary life.

Working primarily in ceramics, Genesis Belanger employs techniques that emphasize the tactile, hand-made quality of her work, in deliberate contrast to the mass-produced objects her sculptures often mimic. She mixes pigment directly into the clay before rolling it out into flat sheets and shaping them into three-dimensional forms. This labor-intensive process imbues each piece with a sense of individuality and imperfection, resisting the homogenization of consumer goods.

In addition to ceramics, Genesis Belanger has incorporated a range of materials—fabric, wood, metal—into her new sculptures. For example, Cause and Effect (2024), a stoneware vacuum cleaner made with silk cashmere suit material, elevates the mundane object to a status of luxury while also questioning the gendered expectations associated with domestic tools. By articulating her conceptual investigations through the very medium of her work, Genesis Belanger sharpens her exploration of how context shapes our understanding of nature, labor, and identity.

GENESIS BELANGER (b. 1978, USA) stages psychologically charged mise-en-scènes composed of idiosyncratic versions of everyday objects. Working in a multitude of materials and techniques, including porcelain, stoneware, metal, wood, upholstery, and painting, Belanger creates tableaux often poised in liminal spaces, infusing scenes with a sense of lobotomized capitalist productivity.

Genesis Belanger's work considers the ways in which American advertising manipulates psychology; the dynamics of consumption; issues of privacy in our increasingly online world; and coping mechanisms for the overwhelm. Her pieces often act as surrogates for human feeling or experience. Belanger's three-dimensional work, although situated within the legacy of Claes Oldenburg and Robert Gober, is concerned with the manifestation of capitalist myths on a gendered psyche.

Genesis Belanger has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Consortium in Dijon, France (2021); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA (2020) and in the New Museum’s Storefront Window, New York, USA (2019).

 

PACE GALLERY LONDON

5 Hanover Square, London

www.pacegallery.com

Liu Jianhua Exhibition @ Pace Gallery Seoul

Liu Jianhua 

Pace Gallery Seoul 

March 31 – April 29, 2023 

LIU JIANHUA

A Unified Core, 2018 

© Liu Jianhua

Pace presents an exhibition of sculptural installations by LIU JIANHUA at its arts complex in Seoul. The presentation focuses on Liu’s mastery of porcelain, a material he has been experimenting with since 1977, when he began working as an apprentice in the Jingdezhen Pottery and Porcelain Sculpture Factory—the oldest established center of ceramic production in China. Significant series form the artist’s oeuvre figure in the show in Seoul, including A Unified Core (2018); The Shape of Trace (2016–2022); Blank Paper (2009–2019) and Lines (2015–2019).

Through his works across sculpture and installation, Liu Jianhua explores themes of accumulation and impermanence, using ceramics, found objects, artifacts, and detritus as means to examine to Chinese history and culture. His longstanding engagement with porcelain can be understood as part of centuries-old craft traditions in China. Liu Jianhua also uses this material as marker of contemporary development within the context of globalization.

The bodies of works included in Pace’s exhibition underscore the artist’s increasingly philosophical approach to form and abstraction, which has characterized his practice in recent years. In 2008, the artist moved away from the sociopolitical themes that had previously informed his work, focusing instead on simple, pure forms to meditate on histories of visual culture in China. This approach has resulted in the sculpture series Blank Paper, in which thin sheets of white porcelain are hung on the wall, as well as the series Lines, for which the artist creates coiling ribbons of porcelain that intersect and collide at various points on the wall.

Liu Jianhua’s 2018 installation A Unified Core, also on view in the show in Seoul, comprises approximately 500 white teardrop- shaped pieces of porcelain suspended from the ceiling. As viewers walk around the work, they experience an immersive environment that encourages deep, serene contemplation.

Other highlights of the exhibition include the artist’s recent series The Shape of Trace, which serves as an investigation of various threads of human cultural development throughout history. Through its lyrical form, this porcelain work evokes the passage of time and the long arc of history. The material of this sculptural installation has great significance within the history of the artist’s own practice—as such, Liu Jianhua’s use of porcelain for the work aligns with its conceptual focus on evolution and progress.

Liu Jianhua participates in the 14th Gwangju Biennale in Korea, April 2023.

PACE GALERY SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Joseon White Porcelain @ Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul

Joseon White Porcelain: Paragon of Virtue 

Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul 

February 28 - May 28, 2023 

Leeum Museum of Art presents the first special exhibition, on ceramics in the history of Leeum, Joseon White Porcelain: Paragon of Virtue. It is organized for the express purpose of bringing together all of the diverse types of Joseon white porcelain in a single place. Because there are so many varieties of Joseon white porcelain, as well as many extant works, it has typically been presented in thematic exhibitions or displays focusing on individual forms or decorative techniques. While such exhibitions and projects are very meaningful in providing an in-depth understanding of certain types or categories, they have thus far precluded any attempt to comprehensively examine the full spectrum of Joseon white porcelain. Notably, the development and modification of Joseon white porcelain over time directly reflects the ups and downs of the society as a whole. Hence, white porcelain can serve as a fascinating lens for examining the entire history of the Joseon Dynasty and the minds of its people.

In order to allow various details to be easily distinguished, this exhibition has been roughly divided into three sections: blue-and-white porcelain, white porcelain in iron-brown or copper-red underglaze, and monochrome white porcelain. With the exception of blue-and-white porcelain, which was generally the highest quality white porcelain of the time, the other two types were produced in kilns throughout the country. Therefore, the displays in those sections have also been subdivided between porcelains produced by the official kilns (near the capital) and by regional kilns.

Through the triumph and turmoil of the full 500-year history of the Joseon Dynasty, numerous white porcelains were steadily produced by each region, which now serve as a mirror for their respective time period. Containing both tradition and innovation, elegance and humor, contraction and expansion, the legacy of Joseon white porcelain cannot be easily described or summarized in a few words. Seeking the best way to approach this quandary, Leeum thought about the society that produced and used these white porcelains in everyday life. Taking another look at the white porcelains featured in this exhibition, it is reminded of the “gunja,” or “superior person,” who manifests the highest virtues and ideals of Neo-Confucianism.

From the time of its founding, Joseon established a centralized system of government based on Neo-Confucianism, which became deeply rooted throughout the country as the fundamental state ideology. By practicing self-cultivation based on their study of Neo-Confucianism, the people of Joseon ultimately aspired to transcend their individual lives and become like the gunja, the model of Neo-Confucian virtue. As this exhibition shows, the physical embodiment of that virtue was white porcelain.

Showcasing the myriad facets of Joseon white porcelain, which widely vary depending on the time period, production site, and decorative technique, Joseon White Porcelain: Paragon of Virtue seeks to move beyond mere aesthetic appreciation by illuminating the conception of the gunja that the people of Joseon sought to emulate. To this end, the exhibition not only introduces a dazzling array of Joseon white porcelains, ranging from the highest quality ceramic treasures to everyday household items used by ordinary citizens, but also describes how these vessels epitomize the fundamental principles of Joseon society. As such, our hope is that the exhibition will open a new horizon for the overall perception of Joseon white porcelain.

LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART

60-16, Itaewon-ro 55-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, 04348

www.leeumhoam.org

Chun Liao at Barrett Marsden Gallery, London

Chun Liao
Barrett Marsden Gallery, London
15 October - 13 November 2004

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1998, Chun Liao has won wide critical acclaim for her exquisite porcelain pots. These are informed by her research into ancient Chinese porcelain bodies and glazes, knowledge she transforms and extends to produce distinctive, contemporary form.

The tapering shapes are finely thrown and finished in a single glaze colour. Chun Liao has recently chosen to restrict her palette to a clear glaze, either used alone, or stained black or with copper carbonate, but she encourages subtle variations of tone and texture through the density of their application and by differing temperature settings of the kiln. Other decorative details are similarly understated, such as where the thin rims of the pots are left delicately ragged, or where tiny rods of applied silver wire descend deep into a wall during the firing process, melting to leave a green coloured trace.

The new body of work is intimate in scale, varying from barely 1cm to 7cms in height. Chun Liao‘s approach is deceptively simple - to throw pots this size demands an extraordinary degree of skill, with the smallest requiring the clay to be steadied on the wheel and pulled up using only the ring or little fingers. Their diminutive scale serves to magnify the characteristics of each form. It underscores their preciousness and calls attention to their seemingly endless range of subtle nuances.

CHUN LIAO was born in Taiwan in 1969 and came to Britain in the early 1990s. She trained in ceramics at Brighton College of Technology, Bath Spa University and the Royal College of Art. Her work has been widely exhibited in the UK, the Netherlands, USA and China and is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Crafts Council, London.

BARRETT MARSDEN GALLERY
17-18 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DN
www.bmgallery.co.uk