Evelyn Taocheng Wang
Evelyn Taocheng Wang. © Evelyn Taocheng Wang. Courtesy of the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam.
Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Winter, 2017. © Evelyn Taocheng Wang. Courtesy of the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam.
In 2017, multidisciplinary artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang released a catalog of diary entries and watercolors to coincide with her first institutional solo show, held at De Hallen Haarlem in the Netherlands. Titled Unintended Experience (A job in Amsterdam), the volume recounted the five months she spent working as a trans woman in a red-light district massage parlor.
Evelyn Taocheng Wang, A Hongkong-Dutch Client Licking My Arm during the Massage Treatment, 2015. © Evelyn Taocheng Wang 2019. Courtesy of the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam.
Wang poetically translates the facets of her identity into her work as videos, drawings, garments, still images, and installations. Trained in Chinese traditional art and classical literature, her work often combines personal narratives with the conventions of traditional Chinese scroll art. For her 2017 show at Galerie Fons Welters in Amsterdam, the artist staged her garments throughout a dreamy gallery setting, allowing narratives to unfold through each piece. This year, she had solo shows at her London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa and at S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent. In October, she’ll open a show at FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, France.
Cathrin Mayer, co-curator of Wang’s 2018 show at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, remarked on the artist’s “incredible ability to tell stories which make us aware of how the body and identity are always culturally relative. In her daring as well as romantic works, she explores how both are shaped by language, garments, and architecture, and reveals the fragile grounds of the self.”
