History of Art Research Seminar Series 2025

(Sponsored by the Simon and June Li Foundation)

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie 

Iris Moon 

5pm November 5

Cinema, The Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

This talk explores the exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (March 24-August 17, 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which reimagined 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. The exhibition explored 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. The talk will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the curatorial process, its hits and misses, while also discussing the stakes of this exhibition and how it contributed new approaches to the study of European decorative arts today.

Iris Moon is Associate Curator for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her books include Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024).