IRIS MOON: What you’re looking at is a Chinese vase from what’s known as the transitional period, and it’s decorated with women enjoying a leisurely day outside, playing games and conversing, with children.

MICHELLE ZAUNER (NARRATOR): By the late 1600s, women began appearing on porcelain as decorative motifs. This wasn’t just an aesthetic choice among manufacturers. It was by necessity: as Iris explains, after the fall of the powerful patrons at the Ming court…

MOON: The major kilns in Jingdezhen, which produced much of the porcelain in China, were completely destroyed as a result of political unrest and war.

ZAUNER: When the kilns in Jingdezhen reopened they looked to new markets.

MOON: They started to turn to more middle-class and upper-middle-class contexts rather than the court, and that resulted in the incorporation of popular prints and romances that featured figures, particularly women, that created a kind of association in the collective imagination with the feminine.

Now the question of gender and porcelain collecting is quite interesting because initially, in the Renaissance, collecting porcelain as a rarity was very much seen as a male and princely pursuit.

ZAUNER: One of the most prominent early European collectors was Augustus the Strong, whose personal collection quickly swelled to more than 20,000 pieces.

You can see examples that he commissioned across the galleries, from a lidded blue and white vase made for his palace to a red stoneware Guanyin. He claimed—with pride—that he had “the porcelain sickness.”

MOON: And yet, on the other hand, when a woman has an obsession and desires this material, it becomes unnatural and pathologized in a way that could never produce anything good.