Asia
Evelyn Taocheng Wang
Reflection Paper No. 2
2013
Reflection Paper No.2
Reflection Paper No. 2 by Wang Taocheng is one of four videos in which Wang attempts to accurately illustrate the writings of influential Chinese Eileen Chang, who published her works during the Japanese occupation of China. Image and text reflect on the everyday experiences of women in society, family, marriage, love, and death. As a voiceover unsuccessfully labors to match and explain each scene, the relationship between the text and the images becomes uncertain. Wang explains: “Reality is often inappropriate.”
Evelyn Taocheng Wang is an artist working at the intersection of various mediums, such as painting, drawing, video, calligraphy and installation, and notions, including traditional Chinese art, modern and contemporary art, colonial history, queer theory, femininity and feminism. Deeply informed by research and history, her work is renowned for its striking blend of imaginative, layered, fragmented, and paradoxical narrations across various forms. Her work aims to address fundamental and global cultural questions filtered through the prism of experience and impression in an attempt to blur and confuse fixed, categorical notions that shape our perceptions. Highly influenced by conceptual art and appropriation, which she embraces but twists with wit - creating imaginary dialogues between unrelated artists, producing ersatz of historical paintings or using traditional drawing methods to address contemporary subjects - Wang’s practice can be seen as a constant, ongoing reflection on authenticity, transmission, identity and influence.