Artist talk: Evelyn Taocheng Wang

Join us for an artist talk between Evelyn Taocheng Wang, and CCA’s Senior Curator Natasha Hoare. They will discuss her exhibition ‘Being Poetic Ruins Life’, currently on view at CCA which includes paintings, handscrolls, installations, videos, and textiles exploring hierarchies of gender, geography, and art making. Her work queers fixed artistic categorisations of painting and drawing, both within Chinese and western traditions, and brings low and high cultural referents into direct contact with wit and painterly dexterity. ‘Being Poetic Ruins Life’ offers a ‘first impression’ of British culture from the position of the Chinese diaspora through the persona of the ‘cultural whore’. Wang will discuss new works drawing on art historical and popular cultural influences from Agnes Martin and James Tissot to Merchant Ivory Film’s such as Room with a View, James Bond, and Count Duckula, and how her use of these motifs and text fragments reflect on class structures, desire, cultural clichés, and the melancholia of a fading British Empire and aristocratic class.

BIOGRAPHY

Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s practice emerges from an interest in what constitutes identity and culture, and how one’s own body is culturally relative to—and intertwined with—autobiographical structures. Evoking multiple personae in her work, Wang interrogates the subject of authenticity, and how we go about performing it. Her practice spans installation, performance, video, sculpture, and a range of painting and drawing styles, while her research is based on various (art) histories, feeding from perceived concepts of East and West, offering fragmented, diary-like views of embodied personal, and external, fantasies and desires.

Born in 1981 in the Sichuan capital city of Chengdu, Wang learned about Soviet Realism, the Russian avant-garde, and European modernism in high school. At Nanjing Normal University, she studied Chinese classical literature, calligraphy, and landscape painting, as well as mathematics and English. In her work she broaches the topic of cultural difference and assimilation, drawing on her multitude of influences to play with language barriers, stereotypes, and material contradictions. An ongoing series includes imitations (or homages) to American painter Agnes Martin, which combine the abstract expressionist’s pared downlayers of mathematical precision with her own contrived motifs and styles. Her work touches on immigration and belonging, interrogating the bureaucratic insignia of authentication and the politics of assimilation.

Language is integral to her practice, allowing her to break into different characters, while using mistakes and discrepancies to negotiate identity and estrangement. Often focusing on the notion of ‘exchange’, imagined and real friendships are unravelled into their fundamental parts, dismantling binary differences between nations, histories, and individuals. Drawing herself into the body of cultural references, Wang’s method is filled with both elegance and incoherence, with an understanding that beauty must remain inexplicable.

Evelyn Taocheng Wang recently opened a solo institutional exhibition at MUSEION Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano. Major solo presentations of Wang’s work have been staged at institutions around the world, including the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; the Kunstverein Düsseldorf; the Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam, as recipient of the ABN Amro Art Prize; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; SMAK, Ghent; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, among others. Wang’s work was included in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Wang’s work is held in several public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo; and the Stedelijk Museums of both Amsterdam & Schiedam.