2025 Shouky Shaheen Lecture in Art History

with Iris Moon, Associate Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

January 23, 2025

5:30-7 pm

Room S150

Next Thursday, the Lamar Dodd School of Art presents the 2025 Shouky Shaheen Lecture in Art History with Dr. Iris Moon, Associate Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Moon, invited by Assistant Professor Elizabeth Saari Browne, will present a talk exploring an upcoming exhibition titled Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, which will be on view from March 25 to August 17, 2025 at the Met.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie exhibition graphic. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Moon's exhibition and talk 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 Moon, on January 23 in Lamar Dodd School of Art room S150 from 5:30 - 7 pm, as she discusses the stakes of this exhibition, and how they contribute new approaches to the study of European decorative arts today.

All are welcome!

Ewer (Brocca) (detail), Medici Porcelain Manufactory, ca. 1575–80. Soft-paste porcelain. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.2046)

About the Lecturer

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.

About the Shouky Shaheen Lecture Series

The Shouky Shaheen lecture is given annually by an internationally recognized artist or scholar at the Dodd. This lecture was established through the generosity of Doris Shaheen as a birthday gift to her husband, Shouky.