Evelyn Taocheng Wang: Sweet Landscape

Museion is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy by Evelyn Taocheng Wang (b. 1981, Chengdu). 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 artist’s focus on the fluid nature of identity and cultural hybridity finds particular resonance in South Tyrol, where various languages and traditions converge. For the exhibition, Wang has created a scenography featuring new paintings on various media that build on her previous work and draw from her impressions of Bolzano gathered during site visits to the city. One of her sources of inspiration was the local food market, where fresh organic fruits and vegetables are piled high in colorful displays resembling miniature landscapes. These arrangements produce layered compositions of color, texture, and form—something the artist also encountered in the medieval frescoes at Roncolo Castle and the Dominican Church—which resonate with her own method of artistic storytelling. By infusing her work with memories of Bolzano’s visual vernacular and her own perception of Italian culture, she writes herself into the scenery with wit, sensitivity, and poetic nuance.

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.”

The seemingly innocent expression aroused by a pleasing landscape, as suggested by the exhibition’s title, provides the backdrop against which the artist’s deeper reflection on place gradually unfolds. Rich in metaphor and language play, Wang’s work engages viewers in a close reading experience in which different layers of meaning are slowly revealed.

The title also mirrors the artist’s exploration of where Eastern and Western understandings of landscape painting intersect and diverge. The Chinese literati tradition of “writing the landscape,” employing calligraphic brushwork and ink, is deeply connected to Taoist principles of balance and harmony. Rather than aiming to imitate nature, this practice is rooted in an approach marked by self-reflection, healing, and forms of retreat from political power structures. 

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.”

Curated by Leonie Radine.