NaBloPoMo 12: Monstrous beauty exhibit at the Met

 

Check the box for monstrous.

What is this thing?

Not all that helpful as far as signs go, honestly.

Here's the description of this exhibit:

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy, Monstrous Beauty adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment.

Admittedly I had to read this like nine times to catch the gist of this whole thing. Is it me and sub-par reading comprehension skills or is there, objectively, a lot going on. You be the judge.

My favorite part of the exhibit was not actually Chinoiserie, which I still don't quite know what that word means except it has something to do with Chinese ceramic design. Oh, I just realized that the first part of the word "Chinoiserie" is "China," maybe that's a clue that someone with more interest in this topic should investigate further.

But wow I loved this dress:

Look at that dress!!! 

Again, not entirely sure what a gorgeous dragon dress is doing in a ceramic exhibition (same timeframe and it's a girl power thing?) that also features monsters not actually made out of porcelain or any form of ceramic from what I could tell. But sure. 

Nonetheless, it was worth the time to wander around. The exhibit was in that low-foot-traffic area behind the medieval choral screen so I also got a chance to confirm the restaurant down there is still not open.