An intriguing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Monstrous Beauty,” brings together more than 200 objects from the 16th century to today, including works by seven contemporary Asian and Asian American women. It is billed as a “feminist revision” of Chinoiserie, asking us to look at these porcelain objects not simply as pretty curiosities but as vehicles for long-held racial and cultural stereotypes about the East, especially when it came to Asian women. All those innocent-seeming pagodas, dragons, bamboo stalks and graceful women, the show argues, had an outsized influence on the West’s image of Asia precisely because they had become so common that people hardly paid attention to them.
The show opens, spectacularly, with five monumental “translated vases” by the Korean sculptor and painter Yeesookyung. The artist glues together pieces of discarded porcelain and covers the cracks with gold leaf in the manner of Asian practices of repair in which breakage is honored as part of an object’s history. But Yeesookyung’s sculptures don’t simply repair the broken vessels, much less honor them: She transforms them into bulbous, hybrid forms, half weird, half gorgeous and even sublime — monstrous beauties, indeed. An apt opening salvo for an exhibition that aims, as an opening statement suggests, “to shatter the lure of the exotic.”
–Aruna D'Souza