Download or read book Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie written by Iris Moon and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2025-03-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monstrous Beauty presents a bold cross-cultural history of porcelain told through a feminist lens. Prized for its delicate quality and whiteness, porcelain was first imported to Europe from China in the early modern period and gained lasting associations with Chinoiserie, a style that encapsulated associations of mystery and enchantment with Asia. This book probes the collective anxieties around gender, race, and sexuality lurking under the surface of this ornate style, derided by some eighteenth-century critics as monstrous and unnatural. In interconnected essays, Iris Moon unpacks Chinoiserie’s language of curiosity and exoticism. Here, close looking at garnitures, plates, tea cups and saucers reveals how the desire to collect and possess porcelain created entrenched cultural myths of the Asian woman, and how it later extended into such mediums as photography and film. In addition, sixteen readings by contemporary artists and scholars, of works ranging from the sixteenth century to the present, respond to this fraught history by asking how we can engage in meaningful dialogues about Chinoiserie today.