8.11.25 — Monstrous Women
The most fragile and beautiful of art forms has become a monster. Make that “Monstrous Beauty,” in what the Met calls “a feminist revision of Chinoiserie,” but women themselves keep getting in the way, through August 17.
Lee Bul is among them, just as she prepares to leave her niche on the Met’s façade, and the whole heads for the Lehman wing, just months after Tibetan mandals. But does it rescue women’s art for women or write them off as less than spiritual? Are they Asian art or European? What century is this anyway? They may have unleashed a monster. 
To be sure, even fine porcelain can get out of hand, and the Rococo made that a virtue. Along with flouncy clothes and depicted gardens, it became the very art of excess in the hands of Jean Antoine Watteau, Jean Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher—who took it from Rococo to revolution. How fitting that the Met’s exhibition comes just as the Frick Collection reopens to the public. To be sure, too, critics have looked to its sources in trade with the East, if not outright seizure. They have asked as well how the decorative arts served as a label for the display of wealth. It allowed its dismissal as less as less than fine art, better suited to China and women.
Monstrous, perhaps, but not half as monstrous as enormous porcelain filling the Lehman wing to overflow. Yeesookyung takes its two-story atrium for gilded fragments in dark colors. The surrounding halls include a handful of other contemporary Asian and Asian American artists, set amid a larger show of a more gilded age. There, too, context is everything, and paintings reinforce the role of decorative arts in defining a portrait sitter’s character for James McNeill Whistler or the transience of existence for Dutch still life. His interior could almost be a knock-off of “Whistler’s mother,” but with darker shadows. Either way, Chinoiserie Chinoiserie she values lies everywhere in the background.
Is it truly monstrous, though, and are the monsters women? The Met has a fondness for embedding contemporaries amid past art, to show history’s relevance, as with Tibetan mandalas last year in the very same space. It sells, but if anything it upstages the past. Looking for a proper history of Chinoiserie, Asian or European, and what set it apart? The work scoots casually across centuries of fans, mirrors, tapestries and tea sets, in no particular order, with carvings and castings almost entirely by men, as one might expect. A collage from 1929 by Mariana Brandt throws Anna Mae Wong, the Hollywood actress, but much has nothing at all to do with Asia.
Why, too, these contemporaries? They include ridiculously ornate porcelain towers by Heidi Lau and Lee Bul, with limbs like writhing snakes. Others, though, appear solely for their take on Asian women. Lau calls hers Anchored the Path of Unknowing, but the curator, Iris Moon, seems awfully knowing. Women’s art, she argues, can only be monstrous because so are stereotypes of women, when they are not simply effeminate. They are queens, mothers, starlets, shoppers, cyborgs, and little more.
One might dismiss women as shoppers, but cyborgs? (Mothers have their own issues.) The show itself points to other roles, as gossips over the tea table or as temptresses from the ocean’s deep. That goes back to the very birth of European literature in Homer, and here they are again on video for Jen Liu, in The Land at the Bottom of the Sea. Candice Lin has her salon, while Jennifer Ling Datchuk plays on narcissism with mirrors, one sprouting hair, and Patty Chang leans into herself on video as well. Arlene Shechet might have entered for her own ceramics, but then they would not be monsters.
They do, though, make a good case for monsters in contemporary art. Chang also spoons melons out of her left breast, and she may have suffered the most at that. Her bare white table could pass for a surgical bed awaiting its next patient or, given its holes, an instrument of torture awaiting straps. It may take a moment to recognize it as a work of art. There is a role for Chinoiserie in defining beauty, but the torture is real. Blame it on your mother.
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