1960's Art Lecture - Dr. Iris Moon: Inside Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

This talk explores the exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (March 24-August 17, 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which 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. The 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. Join Iris Moon for a behind-the-scenes look at the curatorial process, as she discusses the stakes of this exhibition and how they contribute new approaches to the study of European decorative arts today.

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