Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic What do tariff regulators and decorative arts curators have in common? Both must navigate complex questions of international trade: who made what where and for whom, with whose ideas and whose technology? The blue-and-white porcelain that bewitched Europeans when it arrived from China in the mid-16th century spawned a global industry of imports, knock-offs, elaborations, homages and refinements collectively known as “chinoiserie”. That’s French for stuff that’s even vaguely evocative of east Asia, or someone’s third-hand idea of east Asia, and it’s the subject of a provocative, if tendentious, exhibition of irresistible consumer goods at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.This is a show with a point. Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie makes the case that porcelain and other home adornments played a role in shaping at least four continents’ views of each other and specifically the role of women in each one. Platters and ewers teemed with exotic scenes that allowed the imagination to roam in places where women were confined, sexualised, domesticated, or turned into monsters. Those who owned these fragile items, so the argument goes, weren’t just eating off or drinking from them; they were also imbibing a whole cultural ideology.Even if you don’t buy the conclusion (or decline to get bogged down in its arcana by reading all the text panels), the Met provides a sumptuous survey of covetable objects, gorgeous trinkets, and extravagant displays of craftsmanship. You can skim it with pleasure, or dwell on the distasteful implications. Either approach is rewarding in a different way.One of the earliest pieces in the exhibition is a Ming Dynasty plate painted with vegetal motifs that was travelling aboard the Dutch East India Company ship Witte Leeuw when an exploding cannon sank it near Saint Helena in 1613. Nobody in Europe ever saw this piece, which remained entombed, along with another 400kg of porcelain, until the ship’s cargo was salvaged in the 1970s. But the cargo makes it clear how popular China’s product was in the 17th century, and how intricate were the trade routes it followed. The Witte Leeuw set sail from Java, and porcelain also made its way from the Philippines to Mexico, or overland to Italy through Persia and Egypt. Even then, China displayed its talent for gratifying western customers, incorporating an overlay of European taste and technique.Porcelain first arrived in Europe as ballast for lighter cargo, such as spices. But for a continent accustomed to heavy stoneware and stolid pewter, the delicately painted, practically translucent tableware must have seemed like the creation of some mythical workshop. Princes snapped up everything they could find, and had the best pieces set in wrought-metal mounts like trophy grails. Soon, Portuguese, Dutch and British traders vied for control of the market.The competition was so intense that in 1545 Cosimo de’ Medici dispatched an agent on a shopping trip to Alexandria — the global trade equivalent of standing by the kitchen door at a party to nab the canapés before they have a chance to circulate. Not satisfied with the imports, Cosimo set up his own workshop at his court in Florence and had homegrown ceramics decorated with a mixture of Asian and local motifs. On a soft-paste porcelain dish from the late 16th century, two travellers in European headgear hike through a lush floral landscape evocative of Islamic ornamentation.The association with distant fantasylands bred a taste for monsters, including an imaginative menagerie of human-beast hybrids and vines coiling into arabesques. This grotesquerie first sprang from the late 15th-century rediscovery of the Domus Aurea, the Emperor Nero’s villa in Rome, which was extravagantly decorated with fanciful animals. Over time, familiar fiends merged with distant peoples to form an astonishingly durable aesthetic of fascination and fear.“Race was the exotic subconscious of European porcelain,” reads a wall label for a pair of teapots from the 1870s. “Grotesque creatures based on classical models morphed into racial caricatures of Chinese and African people.”Monstrous Beauty highlights the abundance of women cavorting through glazed gardens, beautifully dressed or not dressed at all, presiding haughtily, shopping, reading, mothering, preening, gossiping. A pair of 18th-century saucers made in China for export to Europe show a Dutch milkmaid hoisting her skirts and obligingly bending over. A giant 17th-century porcelain pyramid, a kind of castle for cut flowers fabricated in the Netherlands, has women in various guises: as painted musicians in a Chinese garden, as a quartet of torsos supporting the column at each corner, and as a European matron with a cruciform pendant, perched at the apex as if to reproach all the disreputable goings-on below.That piece belonged in the collection of Queen Mary II, who packed her various palaces so full of delightful tchotchkes that, as a nearby text puts it, “porcelain assaulted the walls, mantels, shelves, and cornices.” Mary’s enthusiasm shifted the market. What had been a preoccupation of male connoisseurs now became the province of women, who amassed the stuff, used it to serve tea, and starred in its painted scenes. Goddesses, actresses and courtesans strolled across platters and around vases, less for the delectation of men than as part of an international sisterhood of pleasure.The imagery transcended materials and geography. In the 18th century, Chinese artists mixed Asian and European subjects and techniques in different proportions, depending on whether they were supplying items for export or the Forbidden Palace. A pair of reverse paintings on glass are eloquent of this cultural mash-up. In one, commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor, a “Woman and Scholar” sit together in amicable quiet, reading, writing and sipping tea. But the setting has a western vibe, with its theatrical curtains and architectural interior receding in perspective. A similar painting from the same place and period introduces us to “Mrs and Miss Revell on a Veranda”, likely the wife and daughter of an East India Company merchant dressed up in Chinese hostess togs for their intimate masquerade.The exhibition covers too long a period and too complex a swirl of influences to hammer all this variety into a cogent feminist argument. Curator Iris Moon tries to extend the historical debate into the realm of contemporary art by including videos and sculptures by Asian and Asian-American women that aspire to “transform negative aspects of a style into visual expressions of power”. Recruiting artists to correct and reproach their forebears seems like a misguided enterprise; in this case, the effort yields nothing but distraction. More persuasive is the evidence of a global trade in luxuries dominated by exchange and opportunism. Europeans craved the Made in China imprimatur for its prestige and quality. Then, aiming for interior decor independence, they manufactured similar items closer to home. Ultimately, though, the mercantile era thrived on artistic products with no clear origin, a form of glorious hybridity that kept the wheels of culture turning for hundreds of years.To August 17, metmuseum.org
