Courtesy of The Met, photo by Eileen Travell.
Patty Chang’s commissioned work Abyssal is featured in “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Made possible with the support of the Kohler Company, Abyssal is a full-size massage table made of raw, unglazed porcelain punctured by holes. After the exhibition closes, the table will be sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of a sturdy horizontal support for a passive body, Chang’s massage table is reimagined as an uncanny object with orifices. Chang writes, “The holes put the body in doubt.” Raising questions about who or what we choose to see, the work recalls the unseen labor of Asian women spa workers, such as the six women killed during the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. Abyssal is also about the possibility of afterlives, regeneration, and transformation. Underwater, the table will serve as a deposit for growing coral.
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. Contemporary works by Asian and Asian American women artists counteract chinoiserie’s stereotypes of exoticism by reclaiming the monstrous as a source of artistic possibility. Viewers themselves form an active part of the exhibition, joining the conversation between works from the past and pieces by contemporary artists.
