From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Porcelain is no simple matter. Fired in the kilns around Jingdezhen in eastern China, it arrived in Europe in the 14th century, captivating monarchs who vied to acquire precious pieces, then raced to discover the secrets of its manufacture as imitation blue-and-white went into production around the world. Meanwhile, ceramic cargos left China for European and other, more distant shores, distributing their wares in the tens of millions as shipwrecks piled porcelain upon the ocean floor. All the while, an elaborate fantasy was taking shape, a set of ideas about distant China and its inhabitants lodging itself in Western minds.
Chinoiserie, the display of objects of Chinese manufacture and the production and display of increasingly aberrant Western imitations, is the visual manifestation of such fantasies. Today, the aesthetic is regarded with distaste, or else as a harmless callback to the comforts of bygone eras. Both viewpoints reduce chinoiserie to something easily dismissible. The Met, however, asks what it would mean to cast a feminist eye on this history.
Bringing together works of art from the 16th century to the present, the show attends to the women, both real and imagined, who engaged with chinoiserie as collectors, appeared within it as figures of fantasy, or came to be conflated with its ornamental objects and decorative surfaces. In its early moments, the exhibition charts the arrival of porcelain in Europe through maritime trade. It’s not a new story, yet we are invited to see this familiar material through objects that emphasise its wondrous strangeness. A delicate, almost translucent white cup, recovered from an early 17th-century shipwreck, appears here encrusted with wrack and debris (including peppercorns, attesting to the other luxuries transported by the Dutch vessel on which it was found, Witte Leeuw). Nearby, a fractured kraak porcelain plate, one of millions to leave China for Europe – often as stabilising ballast stored deep within ships – is rendered singular by its breakage. It becomes a reminder of the colonial violence that opened Eastern trade routes.
Porcelain and pepper from the VOC trading ship De Witte Leeuw (White Lion), which sank in 1613. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Upon its arrival in the West, porcelain became entangled in the identity of its consumers. In a broadly exploratory section, we are invited to imagine the Chinese and Dutch ceramic collection of Mary II, Queen of England (r. 1689–94) as a surrogate body for the childless ruler, who birthed a taste for chinoiserie, rather than heirs to the throne. Mary II devoted herself to the display of her collection, curating galleries and even an extravagant private pavilion where she and her retinue could retreat. The more average (but still affluent) woman had her tea-table, a space of feminine sociability, but also a meeting point for tropical mahogany and South American silver. Yet tea-drinking by and among women prompted anxiety in men, a perspective reflected in a late 18th-century print showing a devil lurking beneath the tea-table while women gossip above.
Chinoiserie was, according to one periodical, ‘a monstrous offspring of wild imagination, undirected by nature or truth’. This exhibition’s objects indeed reveal the proximity of chinoiserie and monstrosity. Dozens of disembodied heads adorn a towering 17th-century Delftware vase, each mouth agape to receive the stem of a single tulip; an alluring yet horrible siren emerges from an 18th-century sweetmeat dish from the Doccia workshop near Florence; a ‘Chinese’ man is contorted by the Minton manufactory into the form of a 19th-century teapot. Over the centuries, what was once wondrous was transformed into a site of racialised ridicule.
Two sweetmeat dishes (c. 1750–60), Doccia Porcelain Manufactory. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Contemporary artists have managed to recuperate the monstrous. The cyborg forms of Lee Bul’s porcelain prostheses make slick battle armour out of fragile materials. An installation by Yeesookyung suggests the possibilities of repair. Shards of blue-and-white, celadon green, blood red, and pitch-black ceramics are sutured together kintsugi-style to create gorgeous and massive presences with a bulging solidity that bespeaks strength.
These and other contemporary artists in the exhibition address the entanglement of Asian women with porcelain objects – a phenomenon encapsulated by the figurine. Before Asian women arrived in Europe, small-scale sculptures circulated an exoticised femininity: representations of the female Bodhisattva Guanyin, allegorical embodiments of Asia, courtesans and other beauties. The exhibition displays these objects in multiples and variations, the duplications making these female subjects seem less than human – and yet there are moments when an individual presence asserts itself with startling force. A pair of reclining and reading women, created in a Chinese workshop for export, seem more like friends than one another’s doubles.
Bodhisattva Guanyin, Ming dynasty, 16th century, China. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The final section of the exhibition brings us up to the 20th century, when once-coveted porcelain became ubiquitous. Women whose lives were structured by chinoiserie fantasies, such as the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong and the Qing Empress Dowager Cixi, were forced to negotiate this new terrain. Decorated with a sinuous sequin dragon, an evening gown worn by Wong in a 1934 film points to the actress’s strategic deployment of tropes of Asian femininity; a self-directed photograph of the Dowager Empress in elegant court dress seems to rebut the caricatures of her in the Western press. Other objects remind us of the violence racialised fantasy entails. Patty Chang’s new sculpture, Abyssal, is an open-ended memorial to the six Asian women murdered in the Atlanta spa shootings in 2021. A massage table made of unglazed porcelain punctured by amorphous openings, it will eventually host coral growth when it is deposited at sea.
Among the works on display, a group of intriguing 19th-century objects seems to ask what notions of China and Asian femininity we inherit today. Reverse-painted on mirrored glass, the portraits of Asian and Western women, real and imagined, look back at us alongside our own reflections. We see ourselves within this slick surface, represented alongside chinoiserie’s subjects and entangled in its ornaments. Do we extricate ourselves, or do we continue to look?
Translated Vase (Nine Dragons in Wonderland) (2017), Yeesookyung. Photo: Andrea Avezzù; © Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia
‘Louvre Couture. Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces’ is at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, until 21 July.
From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.