It begins with a beautiful object and a misunderstanding. The object is admired, replicated, and passed down; the misunderstanding, quietly, becomes tradition. By the time anyone looks closely, the traumatic memory has been forgotten and only a pretty decoration remains.
As translated directly from French, Chinoiserie means “Chinese-ish.” More precisely, however, Chinoiserie is defined by the nineteenth century European elites’ obsessive fantasies of otherness encapsulated in Chinese decorative goods. The word was invented by Honoré de Balzac, a great French novelist of the era, in his 1836 novel L’Interdiction.
This phenomenon, the fetishization and mass consumption of Chinese and Chinese-style items began in the late 1600s and gained popularity in the following century, catalyzed by the early exchange of European and Chinese trade. When porcelain, the quintessence of chinoiserie, first arrived in Europe, its exoticism and delicate beauty instantly made it one of the most alluring, sought-after materials. The demand for Chinese delicacies was amplified in the eighteenth century by the French Rococo style which emphasized lightness and whimsicality, both defining features of chinoiserie.
(Frances Auth)
But the ornamental goods–ranging from silks to porcelain to lacquerware–were not Chinese, nor were they created in Asia at all. Europe’s explosive demand for Asian goods far exceeded the supply; merchants and traders could not deliver fast enough what consumers wished for. Instead, the elite European class created their own brand of “Asian” goods: the chinoiserie that has become familiar to the Western world. These “Chinese-esque” products were crude, inaccurate shells of their genuine counterparts, often portraying Asian people and “Chinese symbols” distortedly and entrenching people’s ignorant, racist perceptions of culture.
Upon arrival, the silks and porcelains that elites coveted for their daintiness became symbols of femininity. By the 18th century, chinoiserie-style tea sets, ornaments, decorations, and furniture were becoming omnipresent in upper-class Europe, and women, the monarchs of the domestic sphere, assumed the role of choosing, purchasing, and commissioning these items. Chinoiserie symbolized a wife’s or daughter’s daintiness, but also adopted an equally feminine shame–breakable porcelain became a reflection of women’s fragile virginity. This dynamic was nearly impossible for women to navigate, but it meant the salvation or ruin of a reputation for many.
This spring, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibit entitled Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, which is currently on view through August 17th, 2025. The exhibit highlights modern Chinese women’s work alongside antique pieces, reorienting the history of chinoiserie through a feminist lens. Iris Moon, the exhibit’s curator and visionary, emphasizes the provocative role of a feminist critique, and how, instead of highlighting the art’s pretty femininity, this lens should shift viewers’ perspective on the artwork and their world. She warns against imagining chinoiserie as beautiful artwork absent critique, writing in her exhibition catalogue, “Tradition combined with nostalgia cast a powerful fog of enchantment upon the present that is difficult to escape.” Even in the last decade, modern chinoiserie exhibitions have neglected to place the exotic fantasies intertwined with the objects’ beauty into perspective, instead blanketing them in a nostalgia that buries the suffering and trauma.
There is a stark difference, as Moon explains in the Monstrous Beauty video tour, between “feminine” and “feminism,” one word denoting the features that society designates woman-like and the other expressing a choice one makes to unfilter their eyes and critique what they see. Monstrous Beauty is decidedly feminist, highlighting both ancient and modern women artists and articulating how the structural violence they faced shaped their work. Instead of simply displaying pretty tea sets and silk dresses, therefore, the curators recentered the exhibit’s narrative around women’s historical use of these items as a method of resilience to the patriarchy, by drawing attention to individuals who shaped chinoiserie’s history.
Queen Mary II was a founder of the chinoiserie craze, influencing her English subjects in the late 1600s to invest in the style. She grew up in England but was forced to move to Holland at nine years old and marry her cousin William of Orange at fifteen. When her husband–a Protestant–overthrew her Catholic father from the throne, Mary returned to England a stranger to her family and her country. In this foreign homeland, Mary found comfort in her extensive chinoiserie collection, shipped over from Holland where she had amassed hundreds of ceramic, porcelain, and lacquer pieces.
Mary knew that her primary role as Queen, despite the deceiving title of co-ruler, was to birth children. In this assignment she was unsuccessful, and the patriarchal norms into which her life was bound deemed her thus powerless. Instead of fading into the bylines of history textbooks because she couldn’t bear children, Mary chose to give birth to something entirely greater: the chinoiserie movement. She decorated her palace with delicate, tasteful items from her collection, leaving a uniquely feminine legacy on the building and inspiring a new wave of chinoiserie obsession in English society. Chinoiserie was, for Mary, a method for propagating her power that otherwise would have only manifested in her children.
(Frances Auth)
The renewed obsession with Asian goods culminated with tea–although now a hallmark of British tradition, there was a time when it was an exotic luxury, a symbol of status accessible only to the wealthy. When Europe first imported tea, aristocrats quickly designated the drink, and all the dishes and etiquette that accompanied it, an indispensable cultural practice. Women filled the domestic role of preparing tea, putting on a doll face to prepare elaborate tea sets and execute perfectly demure sips. This gendered politeness affirmed women’s lack of political and domestic influence, reducing many wives and daughters to their ability to serve tea. However, in the 1700s, the concept of consumer power was emerging, and women found that as tea sets and decorative chinoiserie grew in economic value, so did their own influence. Women began boycotting these purchases, threatening to upset the capitalist system and reclaiming their power.
Although the opium wars of the 19th century quelled the wave of China-oriented obsession, chinoiserie was not dead forever, only shelved. In the 1930s, there was a renewed craze for shabby-chic decor, and mass production of chinoiserie made a comeback. In recent years Instagram has promoted a similar “grand millennial” trend that influenced many people to purchase both antique and modern chinoiserie-style products like redrawn mahjong sets and window curtains. High-end designers also market chinoiserie as part of “exotic” collections. This cycle is evidence of the dangerous phenomenon that Moon warned about: chinoiserie is a projection of beauty and fantasy, and people consistently celebrate its beauty instead of recognizing it as a shell of the culture it pretends to be.
Aileen Kwun, an Asian American fashion writer, wrote for Elle Decor magazine in 2021, “a decorative design object is never just an object. It is a stand-in for what is valued, what is heralded as beautiful, and, when staged as a prized possession in one’s home, it becomes more than a conversation piece. It is a tacit endorsement of the labor and culture that produced it—and of the taste of its owner.” These pieces exist in a cruel dynamic where the owner is in a position of power, not admiring but holding disdain for the culture replicated in their decor.
Monstrous Beauty’s initiative is to unmake this perilous fantasy. Instead of affirming the projection of exotic Chinese beauty, the exhibit highlights the labor, feminist resilience, and cultural appropriation behind many antique pieces. Interspersed in this interactive history lesson is modern art created by Chinese and Chinese-American women artists. These installations are provocative and thought provoking, becoming the literal, physical manifestation of the exhibit’s feminist critique. They create a new entry point to the history of chinoiserie, exploring violence as it defines the contemporary notions of the self, directly juxtaposing the polite, demure, feminine identity expressed in the older pieces.
As a visitor walks west on the first floor of the Met, they approach Monstrous Beauty from above, looking down into an indoor courtyard in the basement, with just the tips of two bulbous installations visible above the railing. This massive initial centerpiece is Yeesookyoung’s Translated Vase, Nine Dragons in Wonderland, a monstrosity of broken and pieced-together ceramic vases. Yee, a Korean artist working in Seoul, grew up hearing her mother refer to broken vases and chipped bowls as analogous to a woman’s broken dignity; cracked porcelain and an impure body were each irreconcilable imperfections. In protest of this narrative, Yee brushed the epoxy that mended the cracks in her vases with 24K gold, celebrating flaws and recentering the established myth.
Each of the exhibits’s modern installations tells a revisionist story like Yee’s: from a sequined, tentacular figure to a massage table with holes in its legs and surfaces to an underwater video of sirens killing a human. Their creepily evocative appearances harmonize beauty and monstrosity in the thoughtful way that Moon imagined. The effect is uncomfortable and revelatory, forcing viewers to reconsider chinoiserie’s loveliness as unnerving and grotesque.
The select antique pieces displayed are not all dainty and beautiful, however. Two teapots, for example, depict extremely racist iterations of a Chinese man and a slave on horseback. Even the more subdued adornments demean the identities they attempt to depict; elementary outlines of racialized faces flatten culture to a series of motifs. In almost every design, figures of dainty Chinese ladies or hardworking men look towards the floor, never making eye contact with the viewer. These barely noticeable details, ubiquitous in chinoiserie, inadvertently entrenched the racial hierarchy and affirmed owners’ condescension towards their own decor.
The Monstrous Beauty exhibit expresses the danger of insensitivity as a product of ignorance, giving viewers a lens through which to view not only the pieces chosen by the Met’s curators, but their entire lives. It asks viewers to confront what they’ve long mistaken for beauty—and to reconsider what it means to look.
This spring, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibit entitled Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, which is currently on view through August 17th, 2025. The exhibit highlights modern Chinese women’s work alongside antique pieces, reorienting the history of chinoiserie through a feminist lens.