The fantasy of China: why new Met exhibition is a big, beautiful lie

The first thing to accept about "China: Through The Looking Glass", the spring exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is that it is not meant to be a critical assessment of the fashion industry’s non-fiction, politically correct relationship with China’s culture, history or its people.

The displayed ballgowns, evening robes and cocktail dresses - which are dazzling - are not treated as historical documents stitched out of silk and cotton, embroidered and beaded. The designers, more often than not, never intended their garments to be commentaries on politics, human rights or the complexity of East-West trade negotiations. They wanted them to make people dream.

But still, the exhibition, which sprawls across three floors, from the Chinese Galleries to the subterranean Anna Wintour Costume Centre, offers a thoughtful, expressive and - at times - utterly breathtaking exploration of China as part of the broader cultural landscape.

This is not an exhibition that offers a plodding treatise on cultural tourism and appropriation. There are no "right" ways to be inspired by Chinese history. The exhibition gives full-throated consideration to "Orientalism" - a word that continues to live among the temples of academia but, according to the exhibition notes, has become secularly defamed as an expression of "Western supremacy and segregation".

"What I wanted to do was take another look at Orientalism," said curator Andrew Bolton in an interview. "When you posit the East is authentic, and the West is unreal, there’s no dialogue to be had."

"China’s export art has colluded in its own myth-making," Bolton noted. The country itself has added to the "misperceptions that have shaped Western ideas".