<p>On Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s process of observation, error, and transformation</p>

Isabel Parkes

‘Who is the master?’

<p>‘I need to follow natural light to make a fake shadow,’ recounts&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/23432/Evelyn-Taocheng-Wang">Evelyn Taocheng Wang</a> in reference to her ongoing series of paintings, ‘Dutch Window,’ begun in 2020. Dutch windows are characterized by a lack of curtains and strong, stately, grid-based forms. Wang, who is based in Rotterdam clarifies: ‘I don’t paint these to be realistic.’ Describing the process behind the primarily monochromatic, multi-layered works, she adds: ‘I make them from memory, which means I have no research phase, but rather rely on an impression.’</p>  <div>First impressions offer Wang an important alternative when observing the world around her – a world she describes as currently existing in a state of hyper-consumption and visibility, defined by an obsessive, continual kind of looking and a desire to be seen. Her ‘Dutch Windows’ rely on a single impression yet result in complex evocations of light, architecture, and tradition. Like their real-life counterparts, they offer the possibility of revealing a great deal, but often, in the end, show relatively little.&nbsp;</div>

<p>‘This is part of why I love&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7257/Agnes-Martin">Agnes Martin</a>,’ Wang continues. ‘Her work reminds me that a painting can be created with different layers and illuminate each of them, which in turn reminds me of my early training with watercolor. Martin’s work inspires me to mix my oil thinly, almost in a way that makes me think of make-up, and that has a feminine quality.’ She pauses before returning to her own work: ‘Each layer of a Dutch Window represents a layer of light. Often, there are six or seven, and together, they convey how the light changes.’ Wang’s prismatic approach to capturing change – in this case, to rendering windows – extends into many areas of her richly associative practice, which ranges from ink drawings to installation and video. In conversation, she is as poetic as she is direct, particularly when asked about her inspiration, her process, and how she employs language.</p>

<p>Indeed, Wang speaks many languages. Born in Chengdu, the capital of China’s southwestern Sichuan province, she studied art, literature, and graphic design at Nanjing Normal University, before completing postgraduate studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and attending De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Wang describes her formal training as beginning with historic Chinese landscape painting but notes that early on she sought alternative ways of looking. ‘As students, we visited museums and copied paintings, but I struggled with the fact that everyone could interpret artworks differently.’ She adds: ‘My suspicion was personal. There was no standard. Where was the master? I felt I was teaching myself, and already at a young age, I enjoyed thinking about who is the amateur and who is the master.’</p>

<p>Germany offered a fertile environment in which to explore such questions. When asked further about her references, Wang enumerates a variety of art historical styles and genres, including history painting, expressionism, and romanticism, alongside conceptual questions, for example, what art requires to exist at all. She also lands quickly on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/53663/Martin-Kippenberger">Martin Kippenberger</a>, who, she notes, ‘dealt with identity and the image in a way that was immediately interesting to me.’ Moving from east to west also exerted a deep influence on the artist. At the academies in Germany and the Netherlands – where, in both instances, classes were conducted primarily in English – Wang points out that terms like ‘national identity’ and ‘body culture’ were new to her, even if their meanings were something she had already long considered.</p>

<p>When asked, for example, about how she works with different media, Wang responds with the observation that this too has to do with the body: ‘A medium is something every artist needs to deal with in order to find their space, their container for ideas. In this sense, it is a body, an organ, a womb.’ With every medium she selects, Wang seems to experiment with a different identity – and to challenge each of them. Her work is neither strictly autobiographical nor auto-fictive, but rather gleaned from a mixture of experiences and temperaments. In commenting on how to select one medium over another, Wang enthusiastically talks about errors and misinterpretation as sites of shifting power and potential transformation. What does it look or feel like, Wang asks, to copy passages of a canonical piece of literature in a foreign language and observe the mistakes one makes alongside the words one acquires?</p>

<p>Language enters our conversation here, as she explains how, when speaking Dutch to locals in Rotterdam, she is frequently answered in English. ‘I think body culture is about how you feel comfortable with yourself, and language is key in this regard. When you speak a new language, you feel nervous and insecure. Language is a force, and in these moments, it’s as if someone is forcing or pushing me to be perfect.’ Language has a significant place in Wang’s drawings and scrolls, as well as in her titles, in which words are often cut up or dissected, quoted, or juxtaposed with homonyms.</p>

<p>Wang is a rule bender. A commitment to fusing right with wrong, quotidian with institutional, and high with low courses through her practice. She inures herself to familiar formats in order to better interrupt her process of making and interpreting those formats This Trojan horse approach cultivates an active experience of looking that carefully conflates fantasy with melancholy, introspection with pop culture, and history with a version of the future that feels uncannily, at times unnervingly, familiar. ‘As an artist, I have lots of work to do to simply mix my two different elements: classical ones with new forms, new words, new body cultures, new national identities.’ Yet, as she adds, ‘All different elements can exist.’ Perhaps this is something to keep in mind when looking at Wang’s work: that the splintering or questioning it provokes, the natural light and the fake shadows, might together be signs of a new and fluid, if more dissonant, kind of coexistence.</p><p>Evelyn Taocheng Wang is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2002/Antenna-Space">Antenna Space</a>, Shanghai; <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2005/Carlos-Ishikawa">Carlos/Ishikawa</a>, London; and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/3658/Galerie-Fons-Welters">Fons Welters</a>, Amsterdam.</p><p>Isabel Parkes is a writer, curator, and producer based in Berlin.</p>

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<p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1.&nbsp;Evelyn Taocheng Wang, <em>Dutch Window No.1 / 5 Layers</em> (detail), 2020. 2.&nbsp;Evelyn Taocheng Wang, <em>Dutch Window No.2 / 7 Layers (</em>detail), 2020. 3.&nbsp;Evelyn Taocheng Wang, <em>Clinic Sis</em> (detail), 2020. 4a (desktop view).&nbsp;Evelyn Taocheng Wang, <em>Were you there too?</em>, 2020. 4b (mobile view).&nbsp;Evelyn Taocheng Wang, <em>EU-Star Sleeve Protector Poster</em>, 2021. All images courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai.</p>

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