I want to hear your description

“Which Italian opera is your favourite? Madame Butterfly or Turandot? Can you describe their stories for me?” Fabio Cherstich’s reflections begin with a conversation that the artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang included in her painting Sweet Puccini Opera and Imitation of Agnes Martin (2026). Cherstich, the director, set designer, and curator, who staged Turandot at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo in 2019, together with the artistic collective AES+F, and who also designed the set for Madama Butterfly there in 2024, explores the issues involved in “describing the stories” of these operas. In his essay, which weaves together stage experience and historical analysis, these narratives emerge as opaque, layered constructions that are inexorably influenced by Western cultural constructs.

This text arose from the invitation by Museion curator Leonie Radine to write a piece based on Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s work, Sweet Puccini Opera and Imitation of Agnes Martin (2026). The painting presents a layered surface, in which Agnes Martin’s sparse, almost ascetic style is overlaid with fragile, intermittent, diary-like notes. In Wang’s work, text does not have an explanatory role. It disrupts rather than clarifies by introducing a voice that disturbs visual continuity and ushers in an unstable narrative dimension.

In this case, a brief conversation appears in the upper left corner of the painting. At first glance, it may seem marginal, but it actually directs the entire work.

“Which Italian opera is your favourite?
Madame Butterfly, or Turandot?
Can you describe their stories for me?”
“Excuse me! You were at the opera house with me together!”
“I know, but I want to hear your description.”

It is a simple, almost naive and yet profoundly challenging exchange. This request to “describe the stories” of Madame Butterfly or Turandot assumes that these narratives are accessible, shareable and transparent. But what we call a “story”, in these cases, is already the result of a complex, layered and, above all, specifically located construction.

When I directed Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot in the production presented with the artistic collective AES+F at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo in 2019, I had the very clear sensation that what I was taking on was not an opera in the usual sense, but a construction. Something that was not just theatrical, but historical, cultural, and almost ideological. Composed between 1920 and 1924, and staged for the first time in 1926 after Puccini’s death, Turandot’s premiere was not a starting point, but the endpoint of a long chain of rewritings.

The opera’s heroine, the princess Turandot, comes from a completely different context to Puccini’s Italy. In the Persian tradition, she appears in Nizami’s 12th century poem, Haft Peykar, as a wise, independent figure endowed with symbolic and intellectual power. Her story is then gradually transformed as it moves towards Europe, where it enters the circuit of eighteenth-century collections of “Oriental” tales, like Les Mille et Un Jours (The Thousand and One Days). A world in which any geographical otherness is already an imaginary space. In the eighteenth century, more specifically in 1762, Carlo Gozzi turned the story into a play, infused with Commedia dell’Arte conventions and a narrative tradition that, from Basile’s Baroque era onwards, had already accustomed the European gaze to treating the fairy tale as a space for projection. From there, the story’s journey continued through Schiller, Maffei, and onto Puccini.

So, there is no original Turandot. Instead, there is a stratification of translations, adaptations and deformations, in which every new shift rewrites rather than restores its origins. The “Orient” in Turandot has also always been a construction, rather than an actual place.

And in this sense, Vincenzo Latronico’s text, written for the libretto, was crucial for me.* When he defines Orientalism as a space in which the West stages the Other to define itself, he makes it clear that we are not facing a question of loyalty, but a device. A device that functions through an extremely stable repertoire of clichés, including ritual cruelty, exotic sensuality, female passivity and indecipherable mystery. Its images may appear contradictory, but they are perfectly complementary, as they respond to the same need to construct an elsewhere that renders Western identity legible by means of contrast.

This is the point at which Madame Butterfly, composed between 1901 and 1904, decisively enters the picture. If Turandot appears as an unstable system, riddled with fractures and interruptions, Butterfly is a perfectly functioning machine. Its emotional trajectory is calibrated with almost absolute precision: expectation, illusion, disappointment and final sacrifice. Everything is constructed to produce identification.

It is here that the device takes on its most effective and, at the same time, most problematic form. Because the subjectivity that emerges — that of the heroine Cio-Cio-San or Madame Butterfly — is not a historical or cultural subjectivity, but a Western construction of otherness. She is a female figure defined by loyalty, dedication, and a willingness to destroy herself. Madame Butterfly does not resist, she dissolves.

Turandot, on the other hand, resists. She says no. It is this that undermines the melodramatic device. Because it is not easy to integrate a woman who says no into the narrative machine of the opera without transforming, neutralizing or taming her. In a Puccini melodrama, desire, conflict, and even death nearly always find some form of emotional resolution. But in Turandot, the heroine’s “no” breaks the mold. And here the opera seems to stop. It is significant that Puccini died before completing the composition, as this left the ending unresolved. It is as if the theatrical problem posed by Turandot — a woman who refuses to be conquered, possessed, or sentimentally brought back into the narrative order of the opera — remained, at least in part, bereft of a solution. In fact, the sudden transition from rejection to love in the finale, completed after Puccini’s death, continues to appear rushed and almost forced. An abrupt conversion that attempts to heal a fracture that the opera itself had opened.

In the production of Turandot staged with AES+F, this instability was symbolized by splitting the set. As Stefano Casi wrote in his article on the production, the audience is faced with three simultaneous spectacles: the music, the stage and the sky. But this three-way division is not a spectacular effect, it is a demonstration of disarticulation. The music continues to believe in the possibility of drama, the stage exhibits its artifice, while the visual image dissolves it in a flow that exceeds the narrative. There is no longer a stable center.

Even the spectacular dimension of violence is removed. No violence actually takes place, but it permeates everything. It is in the language, in the ritual and in the crowd that calls for death. It is no longer an event, but a structure.

The crisis point is inevitably the finale. I chose to eliminate any contact between the two lead characters, Turandot and Calaf. So, no kissing, no transformation, no transfiguration. Just distance. A declaration that remains disembodied. And the slave Liù, who should be dead, gets up and walks away, as if the opera itself were unable to sustain its emotional center.

Despite this, returning to Wang’s painting exhibited at Museion, what remains is that request: I want to hear your description.

And here, a final paradox emerges, that is perhaps the most difficult to avoid. When critically interrogating this system — at different times and in different ways, as a writer, a critic and a director — Vincenzo Latronico, Stefano Casi and myself, all queer, were therefore, at least in part, positioned on the margins of the dominant norm, but at the same time fully within another “norm”: that of being white, Western and European.

This is not a detail, but a structural condition. It means that any critique also occurs within the same cultural field that produced what we are trying to question. So, there is no innocent position from which to tell these stories.

Perhaps this is exactly what Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s sentence leaves open: not so much a request for an explanation, but a question about the origin of the story itself.

What is the story? And above all: whose voice is telling it?

Fabio Cherstich (b. Udine, 1984) is an Italian opera and theater director, set designer, and curator. His work bridges the performing arts, visual culture, and contemporary design, combining classical dramaturgy with experimentation, new media, and site-specific formats.

Alongside his theater work, Cherstich creates performance-based projects that straddle the worlds of fashion and design. In this capacity, he has worked with brands like Cassina, Memphis Milano, Gufram, Acne Studios and Miu Miu, as well as with artists including Goshka Macuga, Formafantasma and Helen Marten. Since 2019, he has been curator of the Larry Stanton Estate in New York, and he also teaches at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi and the IULM University of Milan. He is currently artist in residence at the Fondazione Haydn in Bolzano.

This text is published in connection with Sweet Landscape, the first institutional solo exhibition of Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s work in Italy. Weaving together traditions from art history, fragments of personal memory and artistic forms of autofiction, the Rotterdam-based artist questions the idea of ​​authenticity and investigates the ways in which culture is represented, performed, and embodied. Her art spans a wide range of media, including painting, writing, installation, performance, and fashion, and is expressed through a unique visual language steeped in poetry, subtle humor, and critical depth.

Curated by Leonie Radine

On show until 08.11.2026

* Vincenzo Latronico’s essay is included in the libretto for Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, staged by Fabio Cherstich and AES+F in 2019 at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo: Inventing China. Orientalism around, within and after Turandot.