Join the Lamar Dodd School of Art for the 2025 Shouky Shaheen Lecture in Art History “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie” by Associate Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at Metropolitan Museum of Art, Iris Moon.

Moon joined the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017 and is responsible for European ceramics and glass. Her research on European decorative arts and architecture has been supported by the Decorative Arts Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Clark Art Institute. Alongside curatorial work at The Met, where she is currently organizing an exhibition on Chinoiserie, women, and the porcelain imaginary, she teaches at The Cooper Union. She is the author of Melancholy Wedgwood (2024), Luxury after the Terror (2022) and co-editor with Richard Taws of Time, Media and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (2021). She earned her PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lecture Abstract

This talk explores the upcoming exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (March 24-August 17, 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which 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. Why look at Chinoiserie today? Join Iris Moon as she discusses the stakes of this exhibition, and how they contribute new approaches to the study of European decorative arts today.