Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. 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. Artists whose works are on view include: Patty Chang, Heidi Lau, Lee Bul, Candice Lin, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Jen Liu, and Yeesookyung.
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.