Evelyn Taocheng Wang

Sweet Landscape

Working across a variety of media, including painting, writing, installation, performance, and fashion, the Rotterdam-based artist has developed a unique visual language infused with poetry, subtle humor, and critical depth. By intertwining art historical traditions, fragments of personal memory, and artistic forms of autofiction, she challenges notions of authenticity and interrogates how culture is represented, performed, and embodied.

Wang’s pictorial repertoire draws on what she wittily describes as her “eyeshadow palette of art history,” blending references to her initial training in classical Chinese ink painting and calligraphy and the schools of Western art and literature she encountered after relocating to Europe. She tackles topics such as migration, cultural assimilation, gender expression, and class affiliation, filtering them through her own lived experience and often addressing the complexity of self-perception in the face of externally imposed narratives.

The capacity to shape-shift, to reimagine herself in different cultural and visual landscapes or as various historical or fictional figures, has always been central to Wang’s practice. This is particularly evident in the five key bodies of work the artist elaborates on in the exhibition. Alongside the introduction of new site-specific motifs into her renowned imitations of Agnes Martin’s signature grid paintings on canvas, further references to the region appear in her paintings on silk and on garments selected from her own wardrobe. She also continues to draw from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Frog Prince,” incorporating her recurring character of the Frog Princess into a cityscape reminiscent of an August Macke painting, and expands her series of window paintings. By embedding these bodies of work in an architectural installation that balances interior and exterior scenes, Wang transforms the museum’s second floor into a “sweet landscape.”

On both a philosophical and an aesthetic level, Wang’s exhibition invites audiences to reflect on the relationship between foreground and background, the visible and the hidden, and to sense resonances between the outer world and inner states, external and internal landscapes. In this spirit, the artist explains: “I think of my exhibition as a fantasized womb. This space of becoming gives me a lot of room to respond to the history of this place.”