Evelyn Taocheng Wang
The title of Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s second solo show at Galerie Fons Welters, “Four Season of Women Tragedy,” suggests a stability amid change as part of female identity. Pain is an inevitable part of the cycle, but it will pass. Entering the gallery, one immediately felt it was a space of intimacy. The soft pink–painted walls—inspired by the color of a room at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin—were adorned with an array of drawn and painted works on paper alongside various garments and items such as shoes and handbags, all juxtaposed to form constellations soliciting a subtle kind of reading. Many of the objects looked frayed and vulnerable.
Wang, who was born in Chengdu, China, in 1981 and now lives in Rotterdam, has experienced both cultural and personal transformations, having transitioned from male to female. In part, this show tracked the artist’s process of writing a new narrative for herself. Photosynthesis (all works 2017) consists of fifty color photographs taken either using a self-timer, or by strangers, at the artist’s request. Each picture is set in a different European location and shows Wang in a different outfit. As a group, the images suggest that the artist has conquered something within herself as well as her surroundings. Clothing plays an important role: The show also included garments from Wang’s own wardrobe, all by the French designer Agnès B.—as was at least one of the items worn in each of the photos.
Some of the garments have been personalized in ways that seem to reinforce Wang’s understanding of her changing identity. For Jogging on Rotterdam Harbour, for example, a black leather sports jacket has drawings in black ink on white rice paper stitched to its satin lining. Wang’s appropriation of this high-end garment reveals her desire to be draped in the preexisting meaning that the clothing assigns her while also incorporating her specific history in her own subtle and precise hand. In the framed drawings on rice paper included here, such as Yellow Rose Dress Walking in Graveyard and Save my baby first, the narrative was more explicit. In both, a specific dress is worn by the main figure, who finds herself in an ominous and tragic world surrounded by supernatural figures and forces of nature. Underneath these drawings, the respective dresses lay on the gallery floor, like artifacts of this illustrated legend or proof of the wearer having lived to tell the tale.
The sense of a personal mythology was perhaps most vivid in the four sculptures, created in collaboration with artist Olga Mici´nska, that were named for the seasons. Each of these impressive carved wooden objects is monumental yet nonetheless subtle in the way its soft curved shapes host the dress hanging from it. Spring is the most straight-forward of the group: an elongated coat hanger with a blue cotton half-length trench coat over a red-flowered dress. Winter is a more intricately staged setting, with a free-form, umbrellalike wooden roof over a black wool coat and, just to the side, a black hat on its own stand. Each of the four sculptures stood amid an island of rocks, so that they formed an archipelago of bastions honoring constancy within change—the stability necessary to perceive and deal with setbacks and difficulty in order to find and sustain one’s true self.