This article proposes what I call “quiet excess” to account for Asian diasporic femininities’ aesthetic and affective ambivalence. I put forth an extensive literature review in Asian and Asian American Studies to substantiate the case for “quiet excess”, an amalgamation of affective absence and aesthetic excess. Then, I propose a creative understanding of a Korean artist Yeesookyung’s Translated Vase series, currently showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the exhibition “Monstrous Beauty.” Diverging from a common analysis of this work as using a technique of Kintsugi, I maintain: “If Kintsugi’s gold aestheticizes the seamlessly sutured cracks that constitute a new whole, Translated Vase’s gold-plated epoxy resin exaggerates its unruly aggregation that is not reducible to a new whole. It proclaims itself as an unstable assemblage of fragments that signals a distinctly Asian excess that reveals itself to be beautifully vulgar upon closer inspection” (Yoon 2025, 109). Read more on my interview at Cornell PMA’s website!

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