Evelyn Taocheng Wang: An Equivocal Contrast is the catalogue published in connection with Wang's 2023 solo exhibition of the same title at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Marking the artist's first solo museum exhibition beyond Euro-America, it brought together seventeen new works, twelve of which form a Chinese album imagining a dialogue between Eileen Chang and Agnes Martin. For Wang, Chang and Martin are not simply references or influences, but "readymade personalities" invited into her "powder box of art": figures whose gestures, temperaments, and tones she borrows, reapplies, and reimagines through painting.
The book extends this idea of painting as correspondence. At its center is the complete exchange between Wang and fellow painter Hao Liang. Although the two artists had admired each other's work for years, they first met in person on the opening day of An Equivocal Contrast. Their encounter unfolded into a friendship and a series of email exchanges, in which they move freely from Tang poet Li Shangyin to Japanese painter Toko Shinoda, and between philosophy and technique, brushwork and biography, narrative and material.
A Rotterdam-based, Chinese diaspora artist, Evelyn Taocheng Wang (born 1981 in Chengdu) is renowned for her striking blend of imaginative, layered, fragmented, and paradoxical narrations across various mediums, including painting, drawing, writing, and performance. As an immigrant artist from China who lives and works in the Netherlands, Wang makes work that is deeply rooted in the social context in which she finds herself. Her practice juxtaposes the philosophical and the everyday and merges the emotional, the poetic, and the autobiographical, intertwining transcendental concepts with seemingly superficial and absurd commentaries.
