The result was a presentation that revises assumptions about chinoiserie with the aid of key works by contemporary Asian and Asian American women artists that interrogate the immutable past. LA artist Patty Chang created a newly commissioned work that recalls the unseen labor revealed by the Atlanta spa shootings: a full-size massage table made of raw, unglazed porcelain punctured by holes. After the exhibition closes, it will be sunk in the Pacific Ocean as a deposit for growing coral, part of Chang’s ongoing work with oceans and the environment.
Chang says she was compelled to participate after seeing one of the most fascinating objects in the show: a flower pyramid from around 1695 owned by the porcelain-mad Queen Mary II. On each of the nine levels that ascend to a bust of presumably the queen, a small head sits on every corner with a mouth agape for the insertion of a single flower. “My question was: When you’re the queen and putting a flower into the mouth of this head, are they looking at you?” She regards the piece, which stands nearly as tall as the artist, as “perverse and cruel.”
Beholding her own towering Translated Vase works in the center atrium, Seoul-based artist Yeesookyung—who has made odd, magical objects throughout her three-decade career—felt a different connection to the historical pieces. She admitted that this was her first encounter with many of the European ceramics on view but nevertheless felt a deep kinship between them and her work that she compared to reincarnation. “It’s like finding a missing mother,” she says, “like it’s in my blood.”
The contemporary works bring to the surface overlooked parts of porcelain’s history. The term monstrous from the show’s title, for example, was applied by 18th-century critics who derided chinoiserie as unnatural. It finds resonance with Lee Bul’s Monster: Black from 2011, a tentacled sequin sculpture that commands one of the show’s five galleries. When it emerged from its crate, Moon says, she screamed. “The energy coming off of it was unbelievable,” the curator recalls. “By bringing Lee Bul’s monster piece into dialogue with these 18th-century works, you suddenly realize that language was already living in those historical pieces. We just chose not to see it.”
