Michael joined Aileen Kwun and Dung Ngo as a featured speaker at the Metropolitan Museum’s Creative Convening symposium for its exhibition Monstrous Beauty. Curated by Iris Moon, the exhibition offers a critical examination of Chinoiserie – the decorative style that took shape in early modern Europe with the arrival of porcelain – and the Western fascination with the East, with all its exoticisms, projections, and entanglements with ideas about women, sexuality, and race.

The panel expanded on these themes through a close reading of five case studies: Chinese pavilions and follies in European parks gardens, and palaces; toile wallpapers; lacquer screens as collected by the likes of Coco Chanel and reinterpreted by Eileen Gray; the Chinese chair as a source of inspiration from Danish Modernism to the present; and a recent Alessi juice squeezer – a caricature commissioned by the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The conversation traced how these objects reflect legacies of colonialism, cultural appropriation, homage, and invention, while also acknowledging their intriguing, enduring, and sometimes confounding beauty and cultural influence.

For Michael and Dung, the discussion also echoed an earlier exchange with Aileen, first published in her 2021 Elle Decor piece, Why It’s Time to Rethink Chinoiserie. Written at a moment of heightened anti-Asian violence, the essay gathered the perspectives of AAPI design figures to reframe Chinoiserie not as mere tradition or kitsch, but as a charged visual language – one that encodes cultural values, power dynamics, and appropriation, and that asks us to reconsider how design both mirrors and shapes history.

See the full event here: Creative Convening—Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie