Acquisitions
Evelyn Taocheng Wang - Friendship
2025
In her multifaceted works, Evelyn Taocheng Wang (born in 1981 in Chengdu, China, lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands) explores cultural identities and social relationships, raises questions about belonging, cultural hybridity, and personal memories, and relates these to Western and East Asian traditions of art and thought. Her drawings, which she creates using traditional Chinese techniques of calligraphy and painting, appear as intimate commentaries on Western culture and possess a special power to reflect her own identity in her work.
Wang interweaves personal and art-historical frames of reference. The title Friendship of her installation for the Museum Ludwig refers to a painting of the same name by the North American painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004), whom she admires, and at the same time marks the starting point of a multi-layered dialogue. For her paintings, Wang takes a background from Martin’s geometric-minimalist images, which she names in the picture and reproduces completely by hand. She supplements these “Martin-esque” image fields with precisely painted pieces of cake and characters from the children’s television show Die Sendung mit der Maus, combined with real or seemingly traditional Chinese elements such as self-invented stamps and calligraphic-looking text passages. This is also the case in the works Cream Cake and Imitation of Agnes Martin (2025), acquired on the occasion of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, the series of four works Four Season of Cream Cake and Imitation of Agnes Martin (2025), and the series of twelve works Cakes and One of Twelfth of Agnes Martin Imitation (2025).