When Iris Moon, curator of European Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was asked if she wanted an audio guide to accompany the exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, she hesitated. Moon does not listen to audio guides. (She prefers an independent museum-going experience.) So, the audio producers, Rachel Smith and Erica Getto, had to do some convincing.
“We reassured her by saying, ‘We want this guide to feel like you, as a listener, are walking through this show with your coolest, most knowledgeable friend,’” Getto told Hyperallergic in an interview. By the end of the conversation, Moon was in.
Beyond its capacity to offer a more accessible experience, an audio guide is the ideal complement for Monstrous Beauty, running through August 17. The exhibition aims to radically reinterpret the history and display of chinoiserie, referring to Europe’s fascination with and emulation of East Asian decorative objects. When porcelain and its imitations gained popularity in the 1700s, a flurry of European orientalist fantasies — especially around Asian women — accompanied them. Monstrous Beauty explores how women, as both subjects and consumers, fashioned their own identities in relation to these images, stereotypes, and ideas. “Luxury wasn’t just this inert possession,” Moon explained. “It did things to people. It shaped people’s viewpoints and their worldviews.”
If Moon’s non-chronological, revisionist approach centers women’s voices from the past and the present, then the audio guide invites them into critical dialogue. “From pretty early on, I knew I wanted to bring, in some way, the voices of women, of Asian-American women,” she said. “Then the thought occurred to me: ‘Oh, we should just literally bring the voices.’”
Besides Moon, the audio guide features five speakers: artists Patty Chang and Jen Liu, who have work on display in the exhibition; literary scholar Anne Anlin Cheng; art historian Patricia Ferguson; and author and frontwoman of Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner, who provides the overarching narration. Museum visitors can pull up the guide via a QR code on their phones while they are in the galleries, or they can listen from home on The Met’s website.
Throughout the audio guide, we experience the objects as both historical records and contemporaries that feel alive in the galleries. They assume the role of an interviewer, mediating conversations with the narrators around topics such as desire and artificiality. As Smith explained to Hyperallergic, “You can read something on a wall label and understand on an intellectual level what it’s getting at. But for them to say it in their own words: You literally breathe life into it.”
To each object, the speakers bring their own expertise as well as their subjective experience. The conceptual framework for the exhibition was directly inspired by Cheng’s Ornamentalism (2018), a landmark book examining what she describes as the “life of a subject who lives as an object,” specifically focused on the “yellow woman.” In the book, Cheng essentially asks: How do you express agency when your very personhood has been compromised? Cheng’s contributions to the audio guide are infused with her deep knowledge of this subject matter, and permeated by her personal relationship to it.
“What Iris has done for this show is pick out these super interesting objects where the condition of objectness is multivalent,” said Cheng. One such object is a reverse-painted mirror, featuring a woman in Manchu dress, from 1760. “That’s, in some ways, a typical female vanity portrait, except the figure is incredibly modern. There’s all these details that make her a much more unruly subject.”
In the guide, Moon brings this object into sharper focus. She recounts her first time seeing the mirror in the museum’s storeroom: “It was quite powerful to see a space of reflection being occupied by this incredibly assertive, incredibly self-confident woman — someone who looked like me.” When Moon spoke to Hyperallergic, she elaborated on the immediate relationship one forms with the woman, by seeing one’s own reflection next to that of the Manchu woman.
“She’s smoking a pipe. But not only that, she’s looking at you very directly, and there’s no way not to see her as a person first,” Moon explained. “She’s not even painted on the surface. She’s actually painted on the other side of the mirror.” The mirror then becomes a useful metaphor throughout the exhibition, and the audio guide recreates it by cultivating an atmosphere of self-reflection.
Though the five speakers were recorded separately, this sense of continuity and personal investment acts as connective tissue for the audio guide. Getto and Smith explain that they held roughly two-hour interview sessions with each speaker, which took place from July to October 2024. Afterward, Getto said, they “very carefully picked the moment that gives you the one thing you need to know about an object, or that one insight that really captures the speaker’s ethos.” Getto wrote the first draft of the script in September, and after the interview sessions, the team reworked the copy until the recording session with Zauner in January. Other key contributors to the production process included Christopher Alessandrini, The Met’s managing producer; Austin Fisher, who composed three musical tracks for the guide inspired by Japanese Breakfast; and Joy Kim, Monstrous Beauty’s research assistant.
Zauner is usually recorded in song; here, she serves as narrator, a soft, grounded voice guiding us through the exhibition. Moon said she was inspired by Zauner’s music while writing text for the show’s catalog, and as it turned out, the exhibition themes resonated with Zauner, too.
“I think in some ways, the themes of my record could be defined as ‘monstrous beauty,’” Zauner told Hyperallergic, referring to her new album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), which grapples with temptation and what happens when you follow the siren’s call.
Zauner also comes from a line of voice actors. Her aunt, who has narrated documentaries and voiced cartoon characters, provided some coaching. “She was kind of explaining to me: These are people that are physically in the museum, and they’re taking their time wandering around,” Zauner said.
Getto and Smith accounted for that natural choreography as they put together the final cut. Unlike a typical podcast, which accompanies listeners during commutes or road trips, the audio guide lives within one space. Smith describes the process as a puzzle: figuring out where to put the QR code to access the guide, where people will naturally stop, and how to avoid crowding. Getto said they ran through a list of hypotheticals: “Is someone hitting play and walking and then arriving at a destination, or is someone hitting play, observing everything in their immediate orbit and then walking at the end of the stop?”
This thoughtfulness couples with an openness at the very core of Monstrous Beauty, which takes a set of objects rife with projections, fantasies, and imagined experiences and asks us to think again. The audio guide, too, fractures ideas that require ongoing reevaluation. In doing so, Monstrous Beauty becomes not just a revision of chinoiserie but of feminism itself.
“Feminism, if anything, is about opening new viewpoints,” said Moon. “I don’t want to tell people what to think. I think that’s really important — letting people come to their own conclusions. This relates to what a museum can be to people. It’s about opening new angles.”
