Evelyn Taocheng Wang, a native of Chengdu currently residing in Rotterdam, works across artistic media and different pictorial traditions. Wang’s series of paintings Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time (2022–2023) stem from her long-time fascination with the Canadian-born American painter – a “hermit-master” according to Wang – which started through an encounter with catalogues rather than Martin’s actual paintings. An émigré, both a central figure and an outsider of the Minimalist art milieu and drawing on East Asian thought (Taoism and Zen Buddhism), Martin’s life and work constellate tropes with which Wang identifies and upon which her own language is refracted. For this series, Wang literally followed the captions of selected Martin paintings. Although she indistinctly speaks of “imitation” and “appropriation”, her reading of the captions uncovers a repressed element, namely the amount of water used with the paint. If lightness and fluidity become connectors to the paintings of the Chinese literati tradition, they also distance it from its Confucianist–patriarchal basis, while the insertion of figurative elements within the modernist grid tease Minimalism’s universalist pretences.
This is the first time the work of Evelyn Taocheng Wang is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Adeena May
