The Intricate Backstory of Grandma’s Fine China

On the ground floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, visitors can stroll about blue, white, and gold hydras delicately sprawled out across a central pavilion. These are artist Yeesookyung’s “translations,” created from ceramic shards conjoined by gold-leaf seams, and are the centerpiece of Monstrous Beauty (2025), open through August 17. Yeesookyung’s sculptures are enclosed by the saucer-shaped history of chinoiserie, literally. A tunnel snakes around the central pavilion, proceeding chronologically from the genesis of the ceramics’ popularity in Europe through to its American “afterlife” in modern culture, interspersed with contemporary works by Asian and Asian-American artists. 

Known colloquially as “porcelain” or “china,” chinoiserie has its roots as a European collector’s item in sixteenth-century trade between Asia and Europe, when merchants used Chinese porcelain as ballast in their shipping vessels. Once traders realized the market appeal of the foreign ceramics, chinoiserie industries sprang up to service British, Portuguese, and Dutch ports. The first segment of the exhibit begins here, in a murky chamber reminiscent of the ocean depths—chinoiserie is introduced as a siren, an exotic allure for Europeans and a foreign good with a dangerous transportation method. This is why it is characterized as “monstrous:” the adjective was initially used to describe the unknown and seductive origins of Chinese porcelain. This ambience is particularly accentuated by a large monitor playing The Land at the Bottom of the Sea (2023), a short film by Jen Liu featuring mermaids committing acts of violence in the ocean depths. In it, Liu comments on the exploitation of workers in East Asia using text and audio excerpts that describe the experience of drowning, as well as poor working conditions in factories. Although visually connected to the exhibit through motifs of sirens and sunken goods, The Land at the Bottom of the Sea does not engage with chinoiserie and is only tangentially related in its themes of consumerism and exploitation, detracting from the overall theme of the exhibit. 

Monstrous Beauty then delves into Delft tiles, indicative of the ensuing continent-wide fascination with chinoiserie. Here, the porcelain becomes a symbol of domesticity and femininity, marrying European womanhood with fine china and tea, another imported good. This chinoiserie also reflects a fascination with and dehumanization of women, especially Asian women’s bodies, with decorative knobs designed to look like Chinese women’s heads in “Lidded vase with the head of a Chinese woman” (1765) and mass-produced figurines of Japanese women, such as “Figure of a Standing Beauty” (1670-90). Chinoiserie comes to represent not only the simplification of Asian women into stereotypes ornamenting European sitting rooms but also the constrictive roles of European women which chinoiserie began to symbolize: virtuous homemaking and subdued temperaments.

The final chapter of the exhibit examines the impact of the “New World,” America, on the longevity of chinoiserie through photography and film. Especially highlighted is Anna May Wong, the Chinese-American starlet who, as the exhibit takes pains to mention, was known to American audiences as the human embodiment of chinoiserie. Wong is presented as a stereotyped symbol of modern Chinese womanhood and a transmutation of chinoiserie—an exotic luxury (despite the fact that Wong was born in California) that simultaneously glamorized, simplified, and denied agency to the real women involved. This theme is highlighted by Travis Banton’s Evening Dress (1934), which Wong wore for the movie Limehouse Blues (1934). The dress is long, slinky, and velvety black, with a gold-sequined dragon running the length. It’s a visual representation of the generic roles Wong was forced into: temptress, assassin, and the quintessential “Dragon Lady.” 

Though the modern-day works provide interesting insights and act in dialogue with the historical pieces, they ultimately distract the observer from full immersion in the history and art. A video of Patty Chang slicing open her cantaloupe breasts in Melons (at a loss) (1998) disturbs the contemplative stillness of the exhibit and fragments the continuity of the narrative that the exhibit aims to tell. 

Monstrous Beauty follows its spiral path and ends where it began, taking viewers down a winding path that explores the ways chinoiserie has defined our conceptions of the exotic, of domesticity, of what it means to be a coveted import. Peering back into the first room, a porcelain cup embedded in a chunk of the Witte Leeuw, a shipwrecked Dutch ship, takes the form of an alien tree root. If you squint, it’s indistinguishable from Yeesookyung’s monstrous sculptures, standing vigil just outside.