Embracing Color: Enamel in Chinese Decorative Arts, 1300–1900

Now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Embracing Color: Enamel in Chinese Decorative Arts, 1300–1900” traces how enamel moved from courtly experiment to a refined, widely practiced surface art across six centuries. The exhibition follows techniques and trade routes that carried materials, motifs, and knowledge between China and neighboring worlds, visible in metalwork, porcelain, and other objects made for ritual, gift, and display. In New York, it lands as a quiet corrective to text- and painting-centered narratives of Chinese art. The through line is technical labor, and the cultural meanings that accrued to color.