- I'm Andrew Bolton, curator in the Costume Institute.
I'm also the curator of the exhibition
"China: Through the Looking Glass,"
a collaboration between the Costume Institute
and the Asian Art Department,
as a celebration for their centennial.
The show really isn't about China per se,
it's about the image of China that exists
in the Western imagination.
The exhibition looks at the impact of Chinese aesthetics
on Western fashion.
With all our exhibitions, we try and tell a story.
The looking glass, which is based on Lewis Carroll's novel,
Alice entered this world that was fictional.
The designers in the exhibition approached China
in a very similar way.
Designers tend to be inspired by two overarching themes
that we're focusing on in the exhibition:
Chinese history and cinema.
Cinema plays an important role in the exhibition
as this mediator between the original Chinese garments
or artifacts, and Western fashion.
The three periods of Chinese history that we focus on
are Imperial China, Nationalist China,
and the People's Republic of China.
When you walk into our Costume Institute galleries,
there's a video tunnel showing
Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor,"
a broad and sweeping journey of Chinese history,
and at the end of the tunnel is a festival robe
worn by the last emperor Puyi when he was four years old.
Designers tend to gravitate towards the imperial robe,
which is recognizable by 12 imperial signs,
symbols of the virtues of the emperor.
When they're woven or embroidered onto the robes,
they're very subtle, and so they're very difficult to see,
so we've collaborated with the milliner Stephen Jones
and created headpieces out of them.
It's another portal into the Chinese garments on display.
The Apfel Gallery's really focusing on the qipao,
a dress form that was introduced in China in the '20s,
and it evolved from the imperial robe,
but it also incorporated Western tailoring techniques.
The qipao really was a symbol of modernity.
Part of it was the freedom of movement.
In a way, you can make an association
with the chemise dress and the flapper
as being this symbol of emancipation.
As you leave the Costume Institute galleries,
there is a small gallery that focuses on the Mao suit,
and I think Western designers gravitate towards the Mao suit
because it conveys a sort of utopianism.
It's less interesting from a point of view of aesthetics,
but very interesting from a point of view
of its political underpinnings.
It really was the last garment that said "China."
Upstairs is presented as a series of dialogues
between Chinese objects and Western fashions
that have been inspired by them.
Part of the exhibition tries to disentangle
different layers of meanings and different layers of exchanges
that have always occurred between the East and the West.
Every gallery you enter has its own story.
Anna May Wong was a figure who acted as a bridge
between the East and the West,
but was neither embraced by either culture.
Who was fated to play one-dimensional stereotypes.
A dress she wore in the film "Limehouse Blues" screamed
"dragon lady."
It conflates the sort of sexiness
of the qipao with early 20th century silhouettes.
The after court focuses on Chinese opera.
A series of dresses that John Galliano created for Dior
conflate images and ideas of the Peking opera
with Japanese kabuki
and also the Queen Mother of England.
Two other garments by Maison Martin Margiela
are recycled opera costumes from the 1930s
that have been repurposed as haute couture.
An extraordinary East meets West display of technical virtuosity.
The Douglas Dillon galleries are really focusing
on Chinese objects that have inspired Western designers.
We wanted to collaborate with the Asian Art Department.
They provided a context that's often missing from the runway.
When it comes to Chinese export art,
it's often subsumed within the history
of Western decorative arts.
But there was always a dialogue between the East and West
when it came to export wares,
in particular the blue and white porcelain
that originated in China,
it's exported to the West in the 16th century.
The willow pattern became so successful
that it was re-adapted by Chinese craftsmen.
They re-Orientalized a design already about Orientalism.
This gallery looks at calligraphy.
Language can be both a wall but also a gateway.
A dress by Dior from the '50s in which he's looked to a poem
that we have in the museum's collection as a rubbing.
It looks so beautiful and very poetic,
but the actual content is about the author
having a stomachache.
Language can be about communication,
but it's also about miscommunication.
The gallery that focuses on Chinese silk,
often the motifs that appeared in Chinese silk also appeared
in Chinese wallpaper, so we have a room that is
entirely covered in de Gournay wallpaper.
There's an extraordinary robe à la polonaise juxtaposed
next to a painted silk that was used in a dress by Balenciaga.
On the opposite side is a dress by Alexander McQueen,
directly inspired by a design that de Gournay produced
based on an 18th century prototype.
One gallery looks at the idea of perfume.
Probably the most famous perfume inspired by China
was Saint Laurent's Opium.
Opium was a highly contested scent
because of the seeming trivialization
of the opium wars, but unfortunately the opium den
is one of those sights that have become
another filmic trope in a way,
as a romanticized and deeply exoticized aspect
of Chinese culture.
This particular gallery focused on the different types
of symbols and motifs that were embraced by high Chinoiserie
from the mid-18th century, and primarily focused on
Chinese figures, fantastical landscapes,
Chinese botany, as well as the pagoda.
This coromandel screen from the Met's collection is juxtaposed
with a series of garments by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel,
directly inspired by the coromandel screens
in Chanel's apartment.
Designers also looked further back into Chinese history
and the Weber galleries have a series of conversations
between Western fashion and Chinese decorative art
that dates back even into the Neolithic period.
Western fashions juxtaposed next to Han figurines,
Tang dynasty mirrors, Neolithic pottery.
The small Buddha gallery is devoted to a Chinese designer
called Guo Pei.
And this particular dress has conflated
both Eastern and Western signifiers.
The bodice is an abstracted version of a lotus flower,
one of the eight Buddha symbols.
The actual dress itself is inspired by high-style fashions
of the 1850s.
The attraction of the East and West is less about appropriation
and more about assimilation.
The exhibition concludes with an installation of a bamboo forest,
and the garments on display are inspired by wuxia,
a literary genre that focuses on the martial arts hero
existing in an underworld governed by rules
such as honesty, a rejection of wealth and desire.
This has often led many readers to look to wuxia novels
as an expression of Buddhism.
This power clothing, its accessibility,
who will wear it, designers engage with
an aesthetics of surface rather than the specifics
of cultural context that frees one up to think about it
in different ways--
a way of conveying very subtle ideas that may or may not be
easily accessible.
And I think that's what's so lovely about the Met
is that you're able to use the richness of the collection
to create these visual dialogues,
to give you different ways of understanding both cultures.