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.’”

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</button><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Michelle Zauner recording for the Monstrous Beauty audio guide (photo courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)</figcaption></figure>

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 reflec