In the Shadow of Afong Moy

Jan 26, 2027 – Jul 2027

Curated by Caitlin Beach, Associate Professor, PhD Program in Art History

Still from Astonishing Little Feet (2023), Maegan Houang

In 1834, a teenage girl named Afong Moy was brought from Guangzhou to New York by American merchants, who staged her in an exhibition alongside displays of Chinese export art, furniture, and other wares. Known as “Afong Moy” or sometimes simply as “the Chinese lady,” she appeared before fee-paying audiences in New York and on touring shows as far away as New Orleans and Havana through the 1850s. 

Despite this spectacular visibility, Afong Moy remains elusive. Little is known of her outside of period advertisements that speak more to the Orientalist fantasies of her audiences than anything else. 

This exhibition grapples with Moy’s legacy and considers what it means to think, make art, and live in her shadow. At the center of the exhibition is filmmaker and writer Maegan Houang’s video installation Astonishing Little Feet (2023), which speculatively reimagines Moy’s exhibition and critically interrogates the gazes trained upon her body by so many. Houang’s video will be accompanied by selections from her photo series The Chinese Women: Asian American Women as Afong Moy, in which she photographed sitters from across the Asian diaspora posing on the film’s set. 

These contemporary works will be juxtaposed with a selection of historical printed ephemera as well as Chinese export porcelain, paintings, and ivory and lacquered wares from local collections, many of which came to New York through the same trading routes and commercial networks that Moy herself traveled along with the objects she was made to promote. Moving fluidly between nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, In the Shadow of Afong Moy invites viewers to reflect upon the genealogies of objectification and exotification endured by Asian women in the United States. In so doing, it also asks that we consider what can and cannot be recovered of those who came before us – especially those whose presence in the historical record remains partial at most.