Jen Liu’s work The Land at the Bottom of the Sea (2023) is on view in a group exhibition “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie” at The Met Fifth Avenue, New York.
“Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie radically 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.” – The Met Fifth Avenue
Venue: Gallery 963, The Met Fifth Avenue, 1000 Fifth Avenue, 82nd Street, New York, NY, 10028